1. FOURTEEN Interesting Ways* to Encourage Pupils and their Families to Visit your School Blog This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0 License. (* and Tips)

2. A "subscribe by email" service can be a popular way to bring latest news to parents' email Inboxes #1 - Subscribe

3. #2 Participation Encourage parents to reply to student posts - including them in the dialogue.

4. #3 Involvement Involve parents as active contributors. Working together on a school blog builds new partnerships with staff, and ensures your site has relevant, interesting content. Source: http://edubuzz.org/blogs/kingsmeadow

5. #4 Extra Credit Occasionally offer a "blog only" extra credit assignment... meaning, only tell the students/parents about it on the blog. A fifth grade teacher at my campus once offered (on her blog) 10 points of extra credit if the student brought a stuffed animal to class the next day so they could use them in a writing assignment. When some of the kids showed up with stuffed animals, the others quickly figured out that they should read the blog each night just in case there was something fun offered!

6. #5 Provide links to educational games Use the school blog to provide links to educational resources and activities. You could focus on Core Skills such as Numeracy through Tutpup.com. Create log-ins for all pupils; share these with parents and carers; and even ask that they play together as a 'homework' activity.

7. #6 Interview Parents and Grandparents Invest in a portable mp3 player with a built in microphone. Children can use it to record interviews. For example: My early years - to help write an autobiography Life in the past - to give a sense of history when learning about topics such as WW2 Add the podcast to the blog. See an example here: http://carronshore.edublogs.org/2008/01/21/who- did-we-think-we-were/

8. #7 - Add pupil produced work, video casts and pod casts to your blog so parents can see what goes on in your lessons. See more at www.tinyurl.com/frenchblog

9. #8 A Web 2.0 Open Evening Invite parents, carers and extended family members to come along and see for themselves how children are using free online tools to enhance the school blog or website. Let the children do the presenting and record the event using a site such as http://animoto.com Here's one example: http://tinyurl.com/ya4ev33

10. #9 Let students arrange training for their parents in using the blog With thanks to Humbie Primary. Watch a slideshow of the session.

11. #10 blog trips away. Parents are keen to find out what their children are up to.

12. Who has the most visitors this week... We found it really usefull to have competitions at the beginning of term as to which class got the most visitors! Such as we did here... Use FireStats or a cluster map to judge and was great to see children encouraging their friends, parents and other relatives to visit the blog!

13. #12 Use Google Alerts and delicious to post other web content about your school onto the blog Set up a weekly Google Alert for the school's name. This trawls the 'future web' for web pages which mention the school. Each week, you will receive an email with all new web content about the school, including 'tweets' Set up a school delicious account to bookmark relevant content sent to you by Google Alerts. Carefully tag each then create an embed code at http://delicious.com/help/linkrolls to list them on the school blog

14. #13 Management using their mobile phone to post a daily audio update to the school posterous blog New mobile phones will have an application that allows short audio mp3 files to be recorded as a voice memo Set up a school posterous blog for free. Once the voice memo has been recorded/edited, post it directly by emailing the mp3 file to post@posterous.com Parents/carers can subscribe to the updates by email posterous automatically creates a play button. You can disable the download option

15. #14 Integrate your school Twitter account into the blog Consider: How will you collect daily/regular news items? Who will have responsibility for constructing the 'tweets'? Who is your intended audience? Not following anyone back Checking regularly that you are not being followed by undesirables Which people in the school will be trusted to know the Twitter account log-in. All blogging platforms will allow you to add a Twitter widget to your blog. 'Tweets' will automatically appear on the site

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