This weekend I attended my first blogging conference ever: Bloggy Conference 2013. My intent for attending was as follows:
- I wanted to get tips for becoming a better blogger myself.
- I am considering having my students write blogs themselves (similar to this idea), as I truly believe that if my students write about what they are learning, then they are more likely to retain the information long-term.
- I have a few students this semester who are homeschooling their kids at home and have asked me for suggestions for teaching their children mathematics and I heard there were some home school bloggers coming to the conference and I thought that I might be able to network and get some ideas from them.
The conference was at Cedar Point, a place that seems to primarily be known for its great Roller coasters. Cedar Point was a great place for the conference. The hospitality was great and I learned that there is so much more to Cedar Point. I enjoyed my time on the beach, walking on the boardwalk, the entertainment, and the really good food at all of the restaurants (they have a Perkins, which was a real treat for me since the ones in Michigan have all closed). Despite all of wonderful distractions, I did learn some things, the biggest takeaways being:
- In terms of being a better blogger myself, I learned that I need to have a Facebook Page for my website. I feel like I could definitely reach more people with all of the great ideas that I use in the classroom if I have a Facebook Page were I can share things that don’t necessarily fit onto this website. Right now I am doing this using Twitter by sharing links that I like and so forth, but the general public isn’t on Twitter– most of them are on Facebook.
- I was part of a home school blogging discussion in which I learned that I need to have a regular blogging schedule. I was given several tips for setting up these schedules – from very simple to very extreme. The plan I liked the best is just to set-up a schedule of topics at the beginning of each month that you want to write about in the next month. I can definitely relate to this as it is very similar to what I do in writing lesson plans for my classes.
- Most importantly, though, was all of the networking that I was able to do during the conference. I heard a talk by Honda on #HondaLove about the Top 10 Tips for Making a Perfect Pitch. All of the tips were very helpful for me in terms of the type of checklist of information that I want to create to give my students to help them as they are creating their blogs so that they will have the information that they need if it’s ever requested of them in the future.
Although I was one of the few males there (I felt the need to mention this), I still learned a lot and I met a lot of great people who I hope that I will be able to work with in the future. I would highly recommend that anyone interested in blogging or using blogs in the classroom attend Bloggy Conference or some similar conference in the future.
