Start a summer teacher blog

Summer would be a great time for educators to contribute a blog. They could make this a summer blog and declare it as such. If time did not allow during “the season”, they could simply not add posts.

A summer teacher blog could take various approaches and meet various goals. My son in law has started a blog describing his summer adventures exploring different locations with his young son. He is a teacher and his focus on teaching high school English would fit nicely with blogging. A summer blog will be a way for him to explore the tool and generate some content.

A summer blog could be a way to extend communication with last year’s class or classes or to offer an introduction to the new group coming in next year. The blog could be content related or a way to create or extend relationships.

A summer blog could be content related. Write about the content area you teach. What interesting things have you discovered related to this content. I suppose some of my blogging would fit into this category.

A summer blog could reflect your self-imposed or formal professional development. What are you reading or experiencing and what insights have you gained. I have long argued that teaching or authoring to learn are great ways to develop a deeper understanding of the content we explore.

RSS and Feedly

I have this sense that educators rely too heavily on Twitter to identify useful professional information. While there is some benefit to the discovery that results from the randomness of crowd experiences, I still think there is value in a more systematic approach. The systematic review of useful content sources is made far more efficient through the use of an RSS reader. I think that many gave up on RSS readers or never tried one because the original approach was complicated. The web address for the RSS feed used by the RSS reader to identify new content is not the same as the web address for the content and finding this RSS address gave many users problem. New software makes the process much easier. I created the following video to explain this and provide an example of the reader I recommend.

Blog Backups

I have made a huge time investment in my blogs. I started blogging in 2002 and have added a couple specialized blogs since that time. This work means a lot to me and like any digital work we generate it is worth developing a backup plan.

Backing up a blog is quite different from backing up most forms of content you might generate. Blog content is stored in a database with the exception of media files which are stored separately. In addition, most of us now use a remote server to host our work so a backup involves more than making a copy of a local folder and copying that folder to a second storage device.

Here is what I recommend and how I use the recommended tool. I have three WordPress blogs hosted on leased server space (not WordPress.Com). I use the plugin BackUpWordPress. What I consider the key feature of this plugin is that it both creates a copy of the database data associated with the site and saves a copy of all blog files. Other backup systems I have used only generate the database backup file. You can often generate your own copy of the other folders and files, but the general issue with backups is that most of use never seem to get this done. Automatic is good.

The plugin stores backups as part of the WordPress folder on the server (not really a backup), but sends me an email each time a backup is generated. From the email, I can download the backup and put it where I want. I store my backups in a Box account.

The plugin is quite flexible with settings for the content to be backed up, the frequency of backups, the number of backups to be retained on the server, and an email address for the purpose of verifying the backup has been performed. A paid version of this product offers methods for storing the backups with multiple services, but as I have described you can download and store the backups yourself.

I work against limits imposed by the company I lease space from so I back up once a month and store only two backups on the server. This is for each of three blogs. So, once a month I download three zipped files and store them elsewhere.

Restoring a blog backup takes a little experience. I have done it a couple of times when I ran blog software on a personal server. This, by the way, is why some of my earliest blog posts (from 2002-2003) have text, but not images. You do learn things from your struggles.