This recipe will illustrate how to find one's place in the blogging community.
It has almost become a cliché that the best writing comes from personal experience. However, there is truth to the saying when it comes to blogging. The educational blogging community is vast; blogging in general even more so. To be heard, what we offer needs to be differentiated from what is already generally available. There are many good questions to be asked.
Why am I an authority on this subject?
Why would readers want to read about this topic from my perspective?
How is what I am offering different from what is already available?
Looking at these questions, there are three things that stand out to differentiate your blog—your experience, knowledge, and voice, explained in the following section:
Experience is arguably the most important. Regardless of our position—elementary teacher, secondary teacher, administrator, technologist, and so on—our experiences are different than anyone else's. Our students, our colleagues, and our interactions with them are unique. Those experiences allow us to both illustrate important points, and give the reader an avenue to feel as though he or she has a personal connection to us as writers.
Knowledge and experience are interrelated. For content area teachers, knowledge of a specific subject is often vast and intimate. For elementary teachers, knowledge of pedagogy and child development is paramount. Sharing this knowledge and how it relates to our experiences—in other words, how we apply our knowledge to help improve the lives of our students and colleagues—helps create an experience for the reader that is intrinsically unique. In addition, it is helpful to look at what we can offer that others cannot. What, from our knowledge and experience, is unique?
Thinking back to my days as a high school language arts teacher, voice was often a difficult, abstract idea for students to grasp. Voice is the style with which someone writes; if two people write a paper on the same topic, using the same facts, what makes those papers different is voice, the individual style of the author.
Your voice may appear indistinct, especially if, when starting your blog, you have not written regularly in some time. Do not worry. As you begin to write regularly, and it becomes a habit, the brain adapts, and you develop more facility at it. An interesting occurrence happens for most bloggers. The more that they write, the more distinct their voice, opinions, and topical choices become. In a sense, voice will develop organically over time, and you will eventually find your niche through trial and error, determining what you enjoy writing about, and seeing what posts readers look at the most. The process, however, can be sped up by considering these ideas—experience, knowledge, and voice—early and often in your blogging journey.
To help figure out our own perspective, it can help to see examples of other bloggers with authentic, distinct voices and perspectives. These are educational bloggers who have large followings and specific perspectives. Not all of them use Edublogs as their blogging platform.
Dr. Kevin D. Washburn (http://clerestorylearning.com): Kevin is an educational consultant and former teacher who writes often about the intersection of learning and neurology. How does understanding the brain inform teaching practice?
Dr. Michael Doyle, M.D. (http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com): Michael is a former medical doctor and currently a high school teacher who writes about engaging students authentically with biology.
Jose Vilson (http://thejosevilson.com): Jose is a middle school math teacher and teacher coach who looks at the influence of culture and society on education. He deals with topics that others shy away from, in a straightforward and honest way.
Ira Socol (http://speedchange.blogspot.com): Ira is an educator and activist who has a keen eye for finding out ways that the educational system is discriminating against students, and finding ways to provide new learning opportunities.
John T. Spencer (http://www.educationrethink.com): John is a middle school ELL teacher. John has extremely varied writings across several blogs. He has a great ability to provide immediately applicable insights through personal reflection.
These authors have a few things in common. They are all great writers—several even have published educational and/or fictional books—and they all have very strong opinions. Their readers could likely read a post and identify them as the author without being told who wrote it. That is an invaluable asset.
When I started my blogging journey several years ago, I had no idea what I was really doing. I did not know what I wanted to write about. I wrote generally about education. Both my readership and my purpose were lacking.
Eventually, I figured out what I personally was most interested in—effective ways to integrate technology. I was able to write about this authentically, from my own experiences as an English teacher, a high school library media specialist, an elementary library media specialist, and a district technology coordinator. Even though my circumstances changed, I had a theme from which to build.
The following were a few things that I wanted to do:
I wanted to get feedback on my ideas and lessons
I wanted to post lessons that integrate technology
I wanted to review new tools, both software and hardware, to determine their applicability in education
I wanted to write to crystallize my own thoughts on technology's role in education, assessment, innovative pedagogy, and professional development
The more I explored these topics, the more distinct my blog became. At the same time, my readership increased. By writing about my personal passion in education, my blog became more worthwhile to me personally, as well as to my readers. Also, having specific goals allows you to keep your blog focused. While it can be tempting to write about any diverse topics, the most successful blogs are usually focused and have a driving theme and purpose.