Day 7 – 7 Days To A Better EduBlog

Stephanie didn’t post this until after I retired last night, but this was the final task in her 7 Days to a Better EduBlog mini-course at:

7 Days – Day 7: Setting Up a Blogging Schedule

Essentially, the task for today asks us to “draft a schedule for your blog and publish this schedule to a page on your blog where all of your readers can easily find it.”  I’m going to revise this slightly and simply discuss the schedule I try to maintain with this blog in this entry (as opposed to posting it as a page or anything.

When I consider the schedule that I try to maintain for this blog, there are two things that come to mind: the weekly schedule and the monthly cycle

Weekly Schedule

Each week I try to publish two different weekly entries.  The first is a Friday Funnies feature that uses the comics and humour items from Darren’s Teaching and Developing Online blog (although sometimes this does get moved to a Sunday Comics item).  The other is the Virtual Schooling in the News feature that compiles links to all of the news items related to virtual schooling and cyber schooling that I received in my Google and Yahoo! alerts.

I also try to make sure that I have at least one discussion-focused entry posted each week – although lately that hasn’t been a problem as I have been posting several discussions items each week.

I’ve often wondered if the monthly Blogging About Virtual Schools feature should become a weekly feature – particularly given how many links it contains each month.  What do you think?  Should the Blogging About Virtual Schools change from a monthly feature to a weekly feature due to its size?

Finally, I did used to post the call for participation in the monthly Blog Carnival – prior to discontinuing that feature.

Monthly Cycle

Now the monthly cycle is a little more complicated, largely in part because I miss some of the items in the cycle.  Basically, it is designed to work like this:

Week 1	Monday	Poll feature
		Top # entry
		Meandering Out Loud feature
Week 2	Tuesday/Wednesday	SCCS entries
	Thursday	Clovis entry
	15th	Blog Carnival (discontinued)
	15th	Newsletter sent to subscribers
Week 3	Tuesday	Blogging About Virtual Schools
	Wednesday	Blogging About Generational Differences
Week 4	Monday	VSM Podcast feature
	Last day of the month	Statistics for… entry

I say designed to work like this because it doesn’t always work like this.  I regularly neglect to post the Poll, Top #, and VSM Podcast features, I have missed the Meandering Out Loud feature once, and after announcing it in January or February it took me five months to get the first Newsletter sent (and I didn’t get a chance to send out the July edition).

So when you really size it up, the SCCS and Clovis entries in Week 2, the Blogging About… entries in Week 3, and the Statistics for… entry in Week 4 are the only ones I actually get up with any regularly each month.

Concluding the 7 Days Journey

As I get ready to conclude my 7 Days to a Better EduBlog journey, let me ask you – my readers – these questions.

1. Are there things that I currently do not post about that you would like to see discussed on this blog?
2. Are there features that you have seen on other blogs that you would like me to try out here?
3. If you could provide one suggestion for moving forward, what would you like to see me to more of or do differently?

I look forward to any feedback you may have…