Building communities of bloggers

So having outlined the reasons why I decided that blogs were the way to go for teaching and learning, what is the best way to do it?

I remember a talk given by Tom March once, and he said that everyone should have their own domain. I took his advice, and his recommendation of the hosting service Siteground. I registered my own domain names (well, two, actually - sbaglia.com and thenorthschool.com) and purchased three years worth of hosting.

This is actually a really cheap option that negates the need to deal with advertising, restricted features, and so on. For example, right now I could sign up for a domain for $3.95 a month. With this, you can create as many blogs as you like, as well as anything else you wish to install - wikis, moodles, whatever. And you don't need to be an expert (I assure you, I'm no expert) : hosting usually includes things like cPanel and Fantastico which make it really easy to install and manage all your 'stuff'. Really, purchasing thenorthschool.com was one of the best decisions I made, as it meant I had total and utter control over everything - I could make my own email addresses, I could password protect sites if I didn't want the public to view things, and the simple domain name meant it was easy for teachers, parents and students to find.

But back to the blogs. Wordpress is the number one blog, and with a single click, I was able to install a class blog. But what I was really interested in was a community of bloggers - I didn't want students writing on their blogs in isolation, I wanted a digital community where students could read and comment on the blogs of others. Fortunately, there are lots of free things to help make this happen.

The first bit of good news is that with a bit of mucking around, you can turn a wordpress blog into a blog network. This means that the owner of the blog can create new blogs and new users very easily. So, as the owner of my new class blog, I created blogs for each of my students, all linked back to the class blog. Still though, despite the fact that they were all related, that 'community of bloggers' thing was still elusive.

The final part of the puzzle was Buddypress. Buddypress is a plugin for wordpress sites that puts a nice social network interface over your network of blogs. This is the connective tissue between the blogs, and it allows the students to have both their own unique, identifiable blog and a way to be part of a larger community without losing any independence. Frankly, I think Buddypress is perfect for education. As well as providing a way to find the blogs of others, it adds activity streams, private messaging, groups and forums to your blog site. This pretty much covers all our communication needs. Sometimes you don't know how these things will play out in the classroom - for example, I never found a need to engage the students with private messaging, but it has become an important part of our site, allowing students to message me or other teachers, and for them to communicate with our Virtual Experts. I created some 'how-to' videos for one of our online communities, the Writers' Club, to use Buddypress. Hopefully it will give you a flavour for how it works.

Changing your profile


Changing your blog theme


Writing a blog post


Giving and receiving comments



The beauty of our set up is that we can now create multiple communities on our site. We began with one big community, but I'm slowly coming to realise that our kids can belong to multiple communities based on their own learning needs and interests. For example, our passionate writers are in the Writers' club. We have a book club. There are plans for a Science community. In the same way that I belong to multiple online communities based upon what I want to share and learn, so should our students have their learning experiences personalised.

In my next post, I'll go into more detail as to how to make the communities of blogs a dynamic place for learners.