This will allow the others to respond to things the students write on their learner blogs. Also in 'Settings', you will find an option to receive an email whenever a student publishes their blog. This will save you time regularly checking learner blogs to see if any of your students have posted. Another way of being informed of this is to use the 'Site Feed' function (discussed further below). Keeping students interested Many teachers who start to use blogs find the novelty factor is enough to create student interest in starting to use them. However, blogs work best when learners get into the habit of using them. If learners are not encouraged to post to their blogs frequently, then they can quickly be abandoned. A failed experiment. Here, the teacher in the role of facilitator is vital for maintaining student interest. Here are some ideas to how this can be done: Respond to student posts quickly, writing a short comment related to the content. Ask questions about what the learner writes to create stimulus for writing. Students should be actively encouraged to read and respond (through the commenting feature of the blog) to their classmates. Writing to the blog could be required, and it may form part of the class assessment. Students should be encouraged to post their writing homework on the blog instead of only giving it to the teacher. Some ideas for activities Mystery guest. Invite another teacher or someone from another school or country as a mystery guest to your blog. Ask the students to engage him or her in dialogue and guess their identity. Project work. A blog is an ideal space for developing a project, especially if the project is a shared one between several classes or even classes in different countries. International link-ups. Contact another educational establishment to see if they are interested in a joint blogging project. Students can write about their lives, culture, interests, etc, and be encouraged to read about the other class and respond by writing comments. Photoblog. If you plan on using photographs in your blog, there are lots of tools available to help you. Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) makes publishing photographs to blogs easy. If you want to make photographs central to the blog, however, it is better to use a blogging tool such as Buzznet (http://www.buzznet.com), which is a photo publishing tool and blog rolled into one.