Student Blogs

Student Blog Training Materials, Part 1

I just went through a little bit of training with my newly hired, fresh out of high school student blog team. While preparing for training, I noticed that there was nothing under the large hand of google that was specifically targeted to the training of student bloggers, so I collected a number of posts on the web and developed my own training materials.

I will post three sections on training and a fourth post with links to articles that I found to be helpful to my new blog team. The fifth post will include a questionnaire that I distributed to my bloggers last year. I think it’s helpful to go over this with the new bloggers so they know what areas I’m looking for them to excel in.

My training begins by defining the role of a student blogger, identifying requirements, indicating incentives, and outlining the equipment they’ll be using:

{begin training manual excerpt}

Your Role:

1. Create a blog that matters to you
2. Post about things that would interest your target audience
3. Be Better

Requirements:

1. Post at least 2 times a week (non-micro-blogging)
   Sticky blogs are posted to regularly. You slack on posts and people won’t come back.
2. Add spices

Spices includes links to the internets, micro-blogging, photos, audio, and video. Extra points for your own stuff (really).

Incentives:

• Points for more than doing the absolute minimum (2 times per week)
• Points for creating and adding your own spices
• Points for Being Better
• Points for comments and interaction

Equipment:

• Digital Cameras
• HD Camera
• Moleskine Cahiers
• Pens
• Ambassador Computers

{end training manual excerpt}

Explanation:

The role of my bloggers is not only to post frequently, but to post about things that matter to them personally and would interest a prospective student reader. They also need to continuously strive to improve their blog by adding additional content (media, links, share on facebook, etc.)

By posting twice a week (at least), their blogs will draw students back with fresh new content. If you add spice to a blog, you’re adding links, video, pictures, bulleted lists, bold topic headings, etc. No one wants to read a bunch of paragraphs.

The whole rewards system is subjective and really makes no sense. I take note of well done work and I reward it with prizes of their choosing. Bloggers create wish lists and if they are excellent, they get rewarded.

If you want your bloggers to add pictures and videos, give them the supplies that they need to produce the content.

I’ll have more Student Blog Training Materials after the weekend. Let me know what you’re doing to make your blogs better than last year.

© 2008 Tim Cox.