Provide interaction!
Some posts can be interactive. Allow us to interact with your ideas through conversation. Turn the comments on to invite participation by parents or even students. You can even collect comments from students that won’t be published, to check for understanding as a quick and informal formative assessment strategy.
What other ways can we make your blog interactive? Don’t forget you can embed content into a blog. Post a video. Embed a form to collect information. I can probably think about a lot of instructional examples, which is great for using your blog with students, but I think this tip is equally important for all stakeholders, including parents and our peers in teaching.
Instructionally, you can use the blog comments or an embedded Google form to:
- invite students to finish the beginning of a story (if you want something more substantial, try a wiki page);
- pose challenging problems and see who wants to see if they can figure them out;
- pose trivia questions;
- hide your post with a password post and only give the password (and access to the question and ability to comment) to students who have made an achievement in class (my guess is the password would be motivator for some!);
- ask for feedback on a new lesson or a new instructional technique;
- give students choices about upcoming assignments (use a form as a type of poll, where Google reports-back the results after the answer(s) are given…
If you need tips on embedding Google forms, check out this tutorial.
