My reflections on the 7 Days to a Better EduBlog mini-course

Reflections

I don’t do all of these things (types of posts, best practices in layout and design, blogging schedule, etc.) as much as I should.

Seven days is not long enough to cover everything that I consider essential, but it is long enough to engage others and is just short enough that almost everyone can commit to completing the full seven day course.

Selecting the 7 most essential items of everything that I consider essential is really hard… and I’m still second-guessing myself on some of my choices for this curriculum.

I didn’t anticipate the participation of so many people who I consider to be experienced edubloggers — their participation definitely challenged me to rethink my lessons and tasks to ensure that I was addressing the needs of a broad audience of edubloggers and not just an audience of beginners.

This was fun.  This was a LOT of fun.  I really enjoyed developing the curriculum for this (as challenging as it was), and REALLY enjoyed reading the posts and comments of everyone who participated.

What I Learned

• How to set up threaded comments
• A broader understanding of the variety of ways to set up pages on blogs — there are so many possibilities for this!
• How to run a mini-course on a blog

What I will/won’t do next time

• Won’t schedule a mini-course during same week that I plan to visit mom with my kids (it was way too stressful and I ended up not being able to interact in the comments as much as I wanted)
• Will create a tag for the blog posts (big “ooops” on my part)
• Will promote far and wide — not everyone actively participated, but we still had several very active participants and that made this week very fun for me
• Will keep the mini-course short — no longer than 7 to 10 days — to keep it easy for busy educators to follow
• May split future mini-courses into a beginner’s strand and an experienced blogger’s strand

Next Steps

I will be working on the drawing for the door prize later today and will announce the winner here.  I will also email the winner to get info on where to send the book

I will compile the entire series of posts into a .pdf that will be free for you to download and share with your faculty/staff if you want to use the mini-course in any of your professional development efforts this year.

Finally, I want to give a very big THANK YOU to everyone who participated and everyone who tweeted/retweeted information about the mini-course before and during the 7 days.

Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.