So the BGfL has a new page on Birmingham School Blogs. I happen to think that this is a brilliant tool – let me explain why.
Many schools are now using blogs, but let’s face it, the majority of children (and staff!) would probably be disheartened to see no pageviews on their blog. If it doesn’t take off within their school, the blog can often start to stagnate – I have seen this first-hand with one of my school’s blogs. Don’t get me wrong – this blog isn’t a bad one, but I know it could be so much better with a bit more effort and input from a few more people, although I suspect many don’t understand the purpose of the blog.
Back to the point: the BGfL has always been something of a landing page in schools, being the default IE homepage, so I suspect that it gets a fair amount of traffic. The ‘Birmingham Blogs’ page provides a handy live feed of the latest blog entries from all of the Birmingham schools that are blogging. It even picks up pictures, which is nice. Like with BGfL’s Website of the Week, this gives each school more exposure, and people browsing the page might find blogs that they didn’t previously know existed.
What this means for the individual school is not only better exposure for their blogs, but perhaps more importantly a greater chance of receiving interesting comments on their blog. Nothing is more satisfying in the blogging world than receiving interactions (comments or ratings for example), and just generally knowing that people are looking at your blog and appreciating the work you put into it. I believe it is particularly important for both children and staff to see comments appearing on their blogs to avoid them asking “what’s the point?”
The idea of Quadblogging has become more popular in recent months; in fact one of my schools is due to take part starting this half term. The BGfL’s Birmingham School Blogs page should do a similar thing if used correctly, but it should be capable of doing it better! Where Quadblogging sees each school reaching three others, the BGfL page sees each school potentially reaching 420 others!
The one problem is that pageviews aren’t necessarily tracked, and it is much too easy to view a site, appreciate it, but then close your window or browse to something else. I would really like it if people (particularly teachers) would get into the mindset of leaving quality comments on other people’s blogs. We’d be hypocrites to expect people to leave great quality comments on our blogs if we don’t bother to do the same for others after all.
With this in mind, I am going to be keeping an eye on the Birmingham School Blogs page and I will try to leave at least one comment on a random blog post from the list every few days. Who knows, if I’m lucky maybe the idea will catch on and others will start doing the same!
Primary ICT Technician 
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