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Blogging and the Bibliophile

For middle-school or high-school students who love to read books, the theme for a blog may be right under their noses.

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One of the advantages of being a school student is that you will have to read different kinds of books. There will be other books that you read because you want to. Every time you read a book, you will form an opinion about the book. Sometimes other friends may ask you for your opinion about a book if they know that you have already read it. Those opinions can be the theme of a blog.

In other words, you could set up a book review blog.

Here are a few tips to make your book review blog a rewarding activity.

  1. No spoilers. Do not ever give away the ending of a story, or any plot twists. That would be a disservice to other readers and to the author.
  2. Kindness. Be kind in how you judge a book. It is very tough to be an author, and you want to share only constructive opinions. If a book did not resonate with you, then suggest the kind of readers that may find the book appealing.
  3. Intrigue. Leave some intrigue. Leave some unanswered questions. Make your readers wonder, and want to come back to read your next review.

Remember that if you can write your original thoughts about the books you read, very soon you may even find a following. Some day you may be able to meet and interview the authors of books you read and review on your blog.

Create your own rating system. If it is clever and catchy, bibliophiles
will start looking for your rating on a book, and that is powerful.

Your book reviews can also include a link to the book for readers of your blog to purchase it directly from your favorite book store.

A book review blog will help you develop powerful analytical skills that are very useful in the real world. Do consider creating your own book review blog.

This blog post is a warm-up before introducing school students to the Blog School by
AlligatorZone.

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Blogging to learn in public.

The third in our series on blogging strategies for middle-
and high-school students is about how to use blogging to think aloud while
learning something new.

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Thinking up topics for a blog can sometimes be a challenge. It helps to come up
with a general theme for our blog.

A simple strategy is to set the tone of a learner and write the blog as if we
are thinking aloud. It helps to pick a topic about which we want to learn more, and start writing about it, one blog post after another.

This approach can accomplish a few valuable things besides providing a steady stream of topics for essays.

  • Learning in public through blogging helps us rekindle or develop our innate
    curiosity. The more questions we ask, the better the questions get because we
    learn how to start narrowing our focus on what we want to learn, and thus our
    questions become more focused. Somewhere along the way as we are growing up, we
    stop asking as many questions as we probably used to, when we were toddlers.
    Using a blog to revive that skill of asking a series of questions out of
    curiosity is a worthwhile exercise.
  • Learning in public allows us to stay vulnerable and less subject to
    criticism. Blogs published on the internet can attract cruel public scrutiny.
    Stating upfront that we are merely documenting our learning journey in a
    particular subject changes that perception that we are expert bloggers spewing
    out advice to the world through the blog. Most people want to help a student
    out. A blog can be an honest and authentic attempt at learning a new subject.
  • Learning in public allows us to find allies and mentors in our learning
    journey and present their thoughts as fresh blog posts. This could take the
    form of being able to reach out to experts in the field we are seeking to learn
    and interview them for our blog. We could even invite them as guest bloggers.

In general, learning in public using a blog makes for a powerful strategy to
show future employers and college admissions official how we learn and how we
think. It is a wonderful mechanism to share whatever little we are learning
with others who may know less than us and are not willing to be vulnerable and learn
in public. It is said that we learn a skill must better and faster if we try to
teach it to others.

Last but not the least, using our blog to learn in public, we believe, is a
form of selfless community service, and the joy derived from that very act of
blogging and sharing one’s learning journey becomes its own reward.

This blog post is a warm-up before introducing school students to the Blog School by
AlligatorZone.


Photo credit: Dylan Gillis on Unsplash


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Blogger’s block.

When we start writing essays or blogging, it might take a
while for us to get warmed up. How does one make blogging a regular habit? Here
are a few things to try.

Take one thing or one concept and start trying to understand
it really well. If you want to use the Internet for getting a deeper
understanding of your chosen topic, then cite your sources. If you have a way
to go directly to the source, then try that because it will make your writings unique
and refreshing. For example, if you have any elder in the family who has
experienced the tsunami in Japan or in Sri Lanka, you can have a deep
conversation with them and write about their experience. If you have an
opportunity to sit down with a grand parent and learn about how life was when
they were kids, that could be a source of a unique perspective on life.
Whichever approach you take, keep your essay authentic.

You are writing down a
conversation that is in your mind, or with others, in your own way of
expression.

Feel free to write your blog posts in multiple installments
if you have not arrived at the whole story. Save it in draft mode on your own
computer. Write out the whole thing and post each installment separately, one
after the other. When you do that, try to end each piece of the overall story
with some sort of intrigue or a cliff-hanger. This can make it engaging for the
reader.

Others may not have the same kind of exposure to the things you
write about. That may be the world of video games or the kinds of experiences about
which you are writing. Take the time to explain concepts, scenarios, and things
in simple and non-technical language, without assuming your readers know it so
that they understand what you are trying to convey exactly as intended.

Try to be kind and helpful to your readers when you share
your knowledge by writing on your blog. Give them some context for the topic
you are addressing and try to paint a picture with your words to help your
readers get in the right frame of mind for being able to enjoy your article.

Do not be afraid to use your blog post to pose a question or
leave questions unanswered. The readers may not answer it. However, just
posting the question will help you think about it later, and you may find your
way to the answer as you start thinking about it.

We will share more ideas for making blogging a joyful
pursuit for the middle school and high school student. Remember, blogging is a
written conversation you are starting, first with yourself, and later as you
build an audience, with people who want to hear your perspective.

This blog post is a warm-up before introducing school students to the Blog School by AlligatorZone.

Picture credit:
Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash

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Learning from ‘Dog With A Blog’

July 17, 2018

Can a TV show inspire an educational activity?

We know kids who love to watch ‘Dog With A Blog’, a Disney TV series about a dog Stan, who can speak English and also type — a dog that documents his life — on a blog. Would it then be a challenge getting the kids who know about such TV shows to use writing as an exercise in reflection?

We decided we would find out if kids would care to write a blog post and also enjoy it.

We dovetailed a specially designed blogging activity to a coursework that we are testing out through a recent workshop of AlligatorZone Academy. Part of the goal of the coursework is to help kids try to understand how product marketers and startup CEOs think and communicate to sell.

Success in any field depends on one’s skills at selling. Unless one has retired and moved to a remote island or to a monastery off-the-grid, we are all on sales-mode, trying to selling something or some idea to someone. Whether it is trying to get an A in a school paper with that extra question answered to impress the grader, or whether it is convincing a parent to go watch a movie with them, or if it is writing out that wish-list for the next holiday season, kids intuitively understand how to negotiate and get what they want.

Last summer, VC Kanwal Rekhi suddenly remembered one thing he wished that he had covered in his talk the previous evening to entrepreneurs — that he considers ‘selling’ as the number one skill an entrepreneur must have. I captured it in his own words on video at a lunch meeting the next day and shared it with others (watch the clip below).

Our focus at the Academy’s recent beta workshop has been to help kids understand how entrepreneurs use communication to get things done — and get them done in a cost-efficient manner. I was pleasantly surprised when some of the kids mentioned blogging as one of the highlights of their recent workshop experience.

It probably helped that the kids were already familiar with the concept of blogging. I am told that ‘Dog with a Blog’ is quite popular among elementary-school kids. Perhaps, blogs aren’t just for Stan, the communicator dog from the TV show, after all. However, only time will tell if those students who were excited to write their first blog post will learn how to continue to retain and rekindle that excitement repeatedly, and take their audiences along with them on their journey, while honing their written communication skills.

The writer, Ramesh Sambasivan is the cofounder of AlligatorZone, and a designer of B2B marketing programs with an eye on social-impact to help enterprises that want to grow while giving. This essay documents his firm’s recent effort in designing a curriculum for AlligatorZone Academy to prepare kids for careers that do not yet exist, created at the request of parents seeking a structured alternative learning environment for their school-age kids. Premium programs of the Academy are expected to help make AlligatorZone’s free event-program self-sustaining.