Last week, I taught my very first online blogging course on Skillshare. While I’ve taught several classes on blogging and social media, this was the first time I did it all online.
My class, How to Write Blog Posts That Build a Community, lasted about a week and a half. During that time, my students had project milestones to meet, and I gave three “office hours” lectures live streamed to my YouTube channel from my home office. (That wasn’t intimidating at all, I swear.)
What I really like about the Skillshare platform is that it allows for a lot of discussion. Even before the class started, students were sharing their stories of why they blog and giving each other encouragement and feedback.
Students shared what makes a blog post engaging to them. They then wrote their own engaging blog post and amplified their posts via social media and other tactics.
We talked about how a title of a blog post can grab the attention of a reader, much like Lena’s post Kill and Eat your Cat?. Dan took the boring subject of coding and related it to writing good English in his post, On Coding Well. Vanessa made us reminisce about our favorite teachers in her post, Classroom Memories Can Last Forever, while Christine taught us how to network at a holiday party in her post,Tis the Season to …. Network.
I had a ball reading comments and interacting with everyone throughout the class. Some students, like Shilpa of Imperfectly Perfect Creations, took the feedback and re-worked their posts to take them to the next level.
The cool part is that anyone who was in the class can always have access to the content and discussions. I know I’ll be going back to reference some of the blogs.
While I was originally going to have some sort of comment contest, where students with the most comments would get featured here on another jennifer, I decided that it was a bit too difficult to monitor with nearly 150 students and blogs of varying age. Instead, I am including a linky in this post and asking them to share a post – any post – from their blogs with you. I hope you will visit a few blogs and give them some comment love.
Heck, I hope you find a few new blogs to follow.
To my first online Skillshare students, thanks for a great class. I hope it was helpful to you!
To those who missed it, stay tuned because I hope to be offering it again very soon.
Have you taken an online blogging class? Was it helpful to you?
