This is a presentation I made to help my Beast Bloggers’ Support Group create a Content Plan for their blogs. I wanted them to take a broad view of their objectives and strengths as they develop their blogging identities. I had them list out their objectives, brainstorm a few general topics their blog would cover (for focus) and then list potential post titles. The presentation slideshow is here:

We had each previously pledged to complete 10 blog posts by the New Year, so I guided them to brainstorm topics and titles fo these posts so they could create a roadmap. I showed them my own Content Plan as an example, explained why I did certain things, and let them develop their own.

Blogger s Support Group: Example Content Plan

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In my literature classes, I found that one of the biggest challenges for students when they sit down to write a paper is finding good quotes from the text. A great solution is to put the full text of a novel on your website (or at least link to one). Students can then use their browser’s “Find Word” function (Ctrl+F on Win or Cmd+F on Mac) to search for main Keywords.

You can see above that I searched the text of Crime and Punishment for “agony” and can then find every instance in the book where that word appears. I find this really helps kids review main themes and find the most relevant quote easily.

You can find most classics at Gutenberg.org, Bibliomania.com, or by googling “full text” and the name of your novel.

Another way is to put a passage from the book in quotes in your google search, such as “My watch was still
unwound, and I am rigorously accustomed to wind it the last
thing before going to bed, and many such details.” (remember: the quotes make it so that you find this exact phrase). The likelihood that these words appear together outside of the desired text is nearly nil.

By making the full text available, you can move from students who slavishly insert the first quote they see– because they lack the stamina to search through page after page of quotes– towards students who are making critical decisions about a few easy-to-find choices.