Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the growing expectations placed on today’s educators? Feel like there’s never enough time to build a strong rapport with your community while delivering a rich, modern curriculum? Blogging might help you in more ways than you’d expect!

Blogs have become a well-established part of the online landscape over the past decade. The educational blogging community continues to grow at a rapid pace — evidenced by the over four million blogs on Edublogs, and countless more across other platforms.

You may have no blogging experience at all, or you may have tried it before. Whatever your background, now is a great time to consider starting a new blog.

Here are ten reasons to integrate blogging into your classroom or professional practice — and make sure you read to the very end for a summary infographic you can share!

1. Home-School Connections:

Many teachers establish a class blog as a ‘virtual window into the classroom’. This was my primary purpose for beginning a blog back in 2008 before other advantages and uses became apparent.

Through reading and commenting on posts, families can be a part of what is happening in the classroom and have unmatched access to their child’s education.

Research shows that parent engagement is associated with improvements across a number of areas such as educational outcomes, behaviour and school attendance. Participating virtually now tends to suit many parents who are juggling careers and other demands. This is something that can be actively capitalized on through a classroom blogging program.

It is important to remember that most parents are busy people who need education and ongoing invitations to participate. As a teacher, I certainly found that actively encouraging parent participation in blogging was something that paid off. You may consider offering your parents: handouts, video tutorials, family blogging events, parent information evenings, commenting challenges or email newsletters.

2. Authentic Audiences:

In the traditional classroom, the only audience for student work was the teacher and sometimes classmates and parents. Blogs provide a much larger audience for student work and an avenue for feedback and self-improvement through commenting.

I found that students took particular pride when publishing work for our blog and often wanted to do their best for their impending audience. When we establish an authentic audience for our students we help them connect their classwork to the real world. After all, isn’t that what education is supposed to be about?

3. Literacy Skills:

With a class or individual blog, students are reading and writing for a purpose and genuine audience. Unlike other approaches to teaching literacy, where you may study a genre or style for a few weeks, blogging can be an ongoing occurrence in the classroom.

When high standards are set, and explicit teaching is embedded, a blogging program can be a powerful catalyst to improved literacy skills.

If we want our students to be motivated to use their emerging writing skills, we have to make writing purposeful, challenging, and real-to-life. Blogging offers this.

Traditional literacy skills are also no longer enough for our students. As innovative educator Silvia Tolisano points out, there are now many types of 21st literacies including: digital, media, visual and global literacies. A classroom blogging program can help integrate these literacies into your classroom seamlessly.

4. Classroom Community:

Creating a class blog requires teamwork and collaboration. Students and teachers can learn and share together. The Edublogs’ student and teacher challenges can be a great place to start this learning process.

A real sense of classroom community can be developed through blogging and establishing a class identity. Even if teachers are initially writing posts, students can take on roles and responsibilities such as capturing images, creating multimedia or replying to comments. A class blog mascot can also be a fun way to represent your classroom community.

5. Internet Safety:

Teaching students to be safe and responsible online is an increasingly important issue. Effective internet safety education does not involve one off lessons. This is a notion supported by the experts at Connect Safely who say internet safety concepts should be woven into the curriculum. They point out that students don’t distinguish between their digital lives and their personal lives, and there is a lot of power in using ‘teachable moments’ just as you would with any subject matter.

A classroom blogging program offers ongoing opportunities to discuss internet safety and appropriate online behaviours in an authentic setting. Blogging is an excellent way to learn about being a responsible member of an online community, digital footprints, netiquette, making safe choices and more. As Connect Safely identify, the key messages educators need to teach are: ‘think before you post’ and ‘be kind and respectful’. There is amazing potential to use blogging to promote these exact messages.

Using a platform like Edublogs offers you a lot of freedom to select the privacy settings that you and your community are comfortable with.

6. ICT Skills:

It can be easy to assume that students are ‘digital natives’ and come to school already equipped with a broad range of ICT skills. A review paper published in the journal Teaching and Teacher Education found that “information-savvy digital natives do not exist”.

Becoming an effective and fluent user of information technology requires explicit teaching and practice. Through blogging, many skills are able to be discussed and practised, often incidentally. These can range from keyboard shortcuts, coding, Creative Commons, research skills, using multimedia, troubleshooting and a lot more. Again, these learnings are all for an authentic purpose rather than through skill and drill exercises.

7.Global Connections:

I have found this to be one of the most exciting benefits of blogging for both teachers and students. Blogging can help flatten classroom walls like no other tool.

Over my years of blogging, my students and I got to know many classes across the world who we called our ‘blogging buddies’.

The benefits of global connections are priceless. A sense of understanding and tolerance develops and students can learn a lot about the world in which they live. Blogging partnerships allowed my students to learn from and with their global classmates about topics such as geography, cultures, time zones, seasons, language, internet safety and more.

When blogging is established in your classroom, there is also the possibility to organise or join in structured global projects. The opportunities and potential outcomes are endless.

And from a teacher’s perspective, once you become involved in blogging, your professional learning network can rapidly expand to be a lot larger than your school staffroom. You never know who you will meet and what wonderful relationships you can form!

8. Personal Development:

The process of blogging allows a lot of scope for personal development, for both students and teachers. Blogging offers reinforcement and feedback through comments beyond the immediate classroom community. This can drive self-esteem, personal reflection and growth, as well as confidence. Students and/or teachers may realize they have something important to say, and blogging may encourage individuals to speak their mind, reflect deeply and share their understandings.

Blogging is also a fantastic creative outlet. Whether it’s writing, designing your blog layout, or using photography, video, podcasts or other multimedia tools, blogs offer so much scope for creativity and fun. Blogs can also be used to showcase creative pursuits in art, music, sport, science or any other field.

A blogging program can also help to foster individual talents and passions while driving creativity and personal growth.

9. Lifelong Learning:

Blogging can be an excellent meta-cognitive process and avenue for reflection. The process of creating blog posts, allows you to ‘think about what you think’ and put those thoughts into words. Through delving into my thoughts on topics, and writing about what was happening in my classroom, I often came up with new ideas and strategies to use in my teaching. Additionally, when others offer thoughts and opinions on blog posts, you can be introduced to new perspectives that drive further reflection.

Effective teaching and learning does not occur in a vacuum, and establishing a broad network of global educators is priceless. It’s hard to believe that the majority of teachers are still relying on the insights of their immediate team or school when there are billions of people out there who can broaden their horizons!

Whatever position we are in, we must take advantage of the tools we now have for connecting beyond our immediate surrounds.

10. Blogging is versatile … and free!

What is a blog? It’s anything you want it to be really. It’s like asking ‘what is a classroom?’ We all know a classroom can be indoors, outdoors, in rows, in circles, big, small or even flipped. A blog is merely a website that can be customized to meet your individual requirements.

Blogs offer you the versatility to create a unique online space to represent yourself and/or your students and community. Unlike some online tools, blogging is completely free yet the potential uses and advantages are incomparable.

What Now?

You may be convinced, but what about your school leadership team or community? This post may help you to persuade them that it would be doing your students a disservice to not expose them to all the advantages that blogging offers.

Be sure to check out the infographic summary of this post too!

If you’re ready to start setting up a blog, click here. If the Edublogs team can help with any other questions about blogging, simply leave a comment or contact us on our help and support page.

Blogs are made up of two main content types: posts and pages.

A common question for people new to blogging is, “What’s the difference between posts and pages?”

Here’s a simple explanation to help demystify the difference and understand when to use each one.

Introduction to Posts

Your posts are where you’ll publish your main content.  On class blogs and student blogs your posts are where you’ll publish your main content such as:

• showcases of student work
• information about what’s been happening in class
• assignment information or learning resources

Posts are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order with the most recent post at the top of the page.

By default, your home page is your blog post page and this is where you’ll see your new posts published. If you want your posts to appear on a page other than your homepage refer to:

1. Static Front page.
2. Posting on different pages.

If you look closely at a post you will see it is normally made up of:

1. Post Title – tells the reader what the post is about.  A great post title grabs readers attention and is more likely to encourage them to read your post.
2. Date published – all posts display the date a post was published.  You’ll normally see this displayed at the top of the post.
3. Written by – most themes display the name of the post author.  Your username is automatically displayed unless you have changed your display name.
4. Comments – all themes have a link to comments.  This is where your readers can click to write a comment in response to your post.  Comments allow students and other readers to engage in discussions, share their thoughts, and connect with your class blog.
5. Your post content – this is the main information that you want to share or reflect on with your readers.
6. Categories – are used to help readers locate posts on your blog.  Categories are often used like chapters of a book; they provide a general overview of the topics you blog about.
7. Tags – are used to help readers locate posts on your blog.  Tags are more like the index at the back of the book and explode the topic into a million bits.

Introduction to Pages

Pages on blogs are normally used for information that you want to share with your readers but don’t expect to update frequently.

Common pages on class and student blogs include:

1. The About page – Your About Page is used for telling readers more about yourself and your blog.  Here are how-to’s with examples of About pages on Class blogs and student blogs.
2. Blogging Rules and Guidelines (here’s how to create Blogging Rules and Guidelines).

The main things to remember are:

1. Pages are best suited for information you rarely update such as your About and Blogging Guidelines pages.
2. Situations where you want to discuss a question or topic are better suited to publish as a post and not a page.
3. Assignment and homework information is normally best published as posts and not on a page.
4. Too many pages can make information harder to manage and find.

If you look closely at a page you will see it is normally made up of:

1. Page title – tells the reader what the page is about.
2. Your page content – this is information you want to share on this page.
3. Comments – most themes support comments at the bottom of the page.  Comments are disabled on pages by default and can be enabled.

Posts vs Pages

Below are key differences between pages and posts that are important to understand when working with them.

Commonly asked questions

Here are answers to commonly asked questions we receive:

1. What does the “Not found” message on my homepage mean?

By default, the front page of your blog is set to display your latest posts.

If you delete the default “Hello World’ post before you publish a new post then your front page will display ‘Nothing Found’, ’404 – Not Found Error’ or something similar depending on the theme you are using.

This message is displayed because there is nothing to display on your front page.

All you need to do is go to Posts > Add New and publish a new post.  Once the new post is published you’ll see it displayed on your homepage.

You’ll find more detailed step by step instructions on how to fix a Not Found message here.

2.  How do you delete the Hello World Post?

Every newly created blog is the same default lay out with posts displayed on its home page with a ‘Hello World’ post and a ‘Sample’ page.

You can delete this post at any time by going to Posts > All Posts.  

Hovering your mouse over the title of the Hello post brings up four action links.

Now click on Trash.  This sends it to your Trash folder where it is permanently deleted within 30 days of when you trashed it.

Remember if you delete all posts, and your homepage is your blog post page, you will see a “Not Found” message.

To remove that message you just need to publish a new post by going to Posts > Add New.

3.  Is it possible to publish posts to different pages on my blog?

We’re often asked if it is possible to add posts to other pages, rather than just the front page of the blog.  This approach is used by educators who want to use one blog for multiple classes or subjects and sometimes by students for their ePortfolios.

You do it by sending posts to different pages on your blog by assigning different categories to posts, based on the class or subject, and using a custom menu to create a link to the categories from your top navigation.  When students and parents click on their category they’re taken to all the posts for that class or subject.

You’ll find step by step instructions on using categories to organize multiple classes or subjects on your blog here.

Leave a comment on this post if you need help!

4.  How do you enable comments on pages?

Most themes support comments at the bottom of the page.  Comments are disabled on pages by default and can be enabled by following these instructions.

Do you blog as part of your teaching practice?

Are you looking to reach a wider audience and build a stronger professional network around your work?

This practical post outlines five simple, effective ways to share and promote your teacher blog. Whether you’re just getting started or want more people to engage with what you’re already publishing, these strategies can help your posts reach the readers they’re meant for:

1. Make posts ‘shareable’
2. Use social media
3. Set up an email subscription
4. Encourage others to share your posts
5. Be an audience

If you don’t yet have a blog, that’s no problem. You can get one for free by heading over to the Edublogs homepage.

And if you want to be walked through the process of setting up your blog, check out our free, self-paced course.

Marketing? Really?

The word marketing has got a bad rap in recent decades. Perhaps it makes you think of cheesy, spammy scams, used car salesmen, or endless infomercials.

This is definitely not the sort of marketing we’re talking about here.

As Seth Godin explains, modern marketing is really using the culture to reach people who want to be reached and offering them something they’re glad to find.

There’s probably many members of the education community out there who would love to find you. So, do them a favor and start marketing your wonderful work!

The Benefits Of Blogging For Yourself

Before we look at building an audience through sharing and marketing your blog, let’s go over the many benefits of blogging just for yourself.

What’s the point of blogging even if no one is reading? Is there a point?

Of course!

Blogging is a fantastic way to reflect and develop your thinking

As Clive Thompson stated in Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better,

Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas. By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively. This is why writers often find that it’s only when they start writing that they figure out what they want to say.

The research process of blogging is also an excellent way to learn

Take a topic you know a little about or have some interest in, do some research and present it in an easy-to-digest way for others. You might be surprised at how transformative this learning process is!

Having your own online space can present you with career opportunities

Some professionals also enjoy having a blog or website that serves as a digital portfolio. This home base for all your work and credentials can be an advantage for furthering your career.

Becoming a blogger will help you help your students

Teacher-bloggers can be role models for students as digital citizens and writers.

Furthermore, trying out blogging before introducing it to your students can be a comfortable progression for many educators.

Why Sharing And Marketing Your Blog Applies To Everyone

Despite all of the personal benefits of blogging, you can really amplify things by building an audience.

Clive Thompson explains,

…studies have found that particularly when it comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communicating to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connections, and learn more.

Building an audience also means expanding your professional learning network (PLN); there are countless benefits to building a strong network as we explore in our free self-paced PLN  course for educators.

So we know there are benefits to having an audience for your blog, but building an audience does take work and it requires you to share and market your posts.

How exactly can you share and market your blog? Let’s take a look…

With the rise of the ‘edupreneur’ some teachers are using blogging for financial benefit, however, we’ll be focusing on sharing and marketing for the teacher blogger who’s interesting in connecting and learning with others. 

Strategies To Share And Market Your Posts

You might have put together a fantastic blog post and felt satisfied as you hit the publish button, but your job is not done.

Just because you publish something online, doesn’t mean it will be seen. People won’t know about your post if you don’t share it.

Standing out in a blogosphere populated by millions of people can take work. Fortunately, there are some simple strategies to help ensure your blog post gets an audience.

1) Make Posts ‘Shareable’

Blogging is not like writing a high school essay. A long chunk of text on a page is just not going to appeal to your potential audience. They’ll move on.

The first thing you need to do is look at your styling and post layout because let’s face it; people aren’t going to share your post if the content was too difficult to even read.

Our post 10 Tips For Making Your Blog Posts Easier To Read will help guide you through the process of creating easy to read posts.

The Power Of Visuals

We know how powerful visuals are! A Hubspot article tells us,

Eye-tracking studies show internet readers pay close attention to information-carrying images. In fact, when the images are relevant, readers spend more time looking at the images than they do reading text on the page.

Studies have shown that visitors to your blog will probably only read about 20% of your post. People generally scroll through and skim posts. Images give people a reason to stop scrolling.

Through an image, people may be more likely to take in your content and share it with others.

What Sort Of Visuals Can You Make For Blog Posts?

There are all sorts of visuals you can include in your posts. Let’s explore three popular additions to blog posts — social media graphics, infographics, and quotes.

Graphics to share on social media

Bloggers often create a graphic to accompany their blog post which makes a social media post stand out. It’s generally just the title of the blog post with an image and the blog URL — perhaps with blogger’s name or social media handle too.

Whenever we create a new post on The Edublogger, we create a simple graphic to go with it.

For example:

There are certain size dimensions that are ideal for different social media platforms as outlined here by Louise M. (Tip: If you’re using Canva which we will explain below, it will generate the correct size automatically).

Infographics

An infographic can be a great way to summarize information or data and make posts more shareable.

The 10 Ways To Make You Blog Posts Easier To Read visual above is an example of an infographic that acts like a ‘cheat sheet’.

Here is another example we prepared for International Dot Day. This sort of thing can really help the time-poor reader.

Quotes

Quotes can be powerful additions to blog posts. They can offer a burst of insightful learning and back up your own thoughts.

In our post about quotes, we outlined different ways you can use quotes and turn them into shareable graphics.

You wouldn’t want to make every quote into a graphic but it can certainly give your readers something else to focus on and share.

A quote graphic might display the words over an image, pattern, or a block color.

How To Make Visuals For Blog Posts

There are many different ways you can make the sorts of visuals we described above.

There are a number of offline tools available, such as Adobe Photoshop or Indesign, however, online tools are more popular than ever. A lot of these tools are based on templates, so you don’t even need design skills.

Just some online tools for making visuals include:

• Canva (solid free plan with paid options — see below)
• Adobe Express (free for teachers and students)
• Stencil (free plan allows for 10 creations per month)
• Snappa (free plan allows for 3 downloads per month)

Canva tips and information

Canva is certainly one of the most popular tools for bloggers and it’s one I personally love to use!

• Canva has millions of users worldwide and is popular in many industries, including education.
• Students under 13 can use Canva if they’re ‘appropriately supervised’. (Read Richard Byrne’s post about this topic for further clarification).
• Canva is a web-based tool but there are also apps for Android and iOS.
• The free plan allows you to make unlimited creations and download them in high quality without watermarks. This sets Canva apart from some similar tools.
• The paid ‘Canva for Work‘ plan gives you access to more templates, images, and icons etc. It also allows you to resize your design without starting again (e.g. you might make something in A4 size then want a smaller version to share on social media). Additionally, you can download your designs with a transparent background (handy for logos, badges, buttons etc.).
• Canva uses a drag and drop interface which is very simple to use but like all tools, does require a little bit of playing around to develop fluency. It’s worth the investment in time!

Check out this post I wrote about Canva for more information and ideas.

2) Use Social Media

A lot of people who might be interested in your blog posts are hanging out on social media. You want to strategically share your content on social media and make it easy for others to share as well.

Share Your Own Content

There are a few things to keep in mind when sharing your own blog posts on social media

Consider your platform(s)

Teachers are active on different platforms — X (formerly Twitter) has traditionally been very popular with teachers (if you’re new to X you can find out more information here). There are also a large number of teachers active on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc.

You don’t have to be sharing on every platform. Using one or two social media platforms well can be a more successful approach than spreading yourself thin across different networks.

Tailor your message

If you are going to share your posts across various social media platforms, tailor your message to cater to the different audiences and the different ways the platforms are used.

For example, Instagram and X use hashtags more than Facebook. Pinterest tends to center around larger ‘shareable’ images. X has a 280 character limit whereas Facebook allows you to write lengthier posts.

Keep these sorts of details in mind if you’re going to cross-promote your posts. Copying and pasting may not be the best approach.

Repeat, but don’t overdo it

Just because you post something on social media, doesn’t mean it will be widely seen. You might need to post a variation of the message a number of times.

Repeating the same message without variation is not a good idea and is against the rules with some social media channels. On X posting ‘duplicative or substantially similar content’ is not allowed.

To make posting on social media easier, some people use a social media scheduler like Buffer or Hootsuite although use this approach with care. You don’t want to look like a robot!

Make your posts stand out!

We know that each social media platform has its own best practices for formatting updates. Let’s focus on X for a moment and take a look at the sorts of tweets that are more likely to stand out.

You can just share the title of your post and the link but is this really going to be noticed in a busy stream of tweets?

Compare these two tweets about the same post and consider which one would stand out more…

Images, emojis, quotes, summaries of information, GIFs, videos etc. can all help to make a tweet stand out and encourage others to read it, share it, and/or click on the link to the post.

3) Set Up An Email Subscription

How are people keeping up to date with blogs?

Traditionally, people would subscribe to get email notifications of new posts on blogs they enjoy reading. Or they’d use an RSS Feeder (a popular one is Feedly. You can read more about how this works here).

Email and RSS are still being used, however, things have changed a little.

These days, many readers keep up with blogs through social media rather than email or RSS.

Why is social media a popular way to follow blogs?

Perhaps:

• People are getting more emails than ever before so are becoming more selective with what subscriptions they sign up for. They might only subscribe to a handful of their favorite blogs.
• Some individuals are becoming more satisfied with consuming information serendipitously.

Should I bother with an email subscription?

Social media is a great way to share but here are a few thoughts to keep in mind about the power of offering an email subscription:

• Having an email subscription option is going to allow your most loyal and valuable members of your community to stay in touch with you.
• There are no guarantees that people in your network will see your posts on social media. You can’t control that. Offer your readers a channel to make sure they don’t miss your content.
• Email is much more personal than social media. Your readers can hear directly from you and it can help to build a relationship.

How To Make An Email Subscription

So we’ve established that it’s definitely a good idea to have some sort of option available for readers who would like to subscribe to your blog via email.

Now you have two choices. Do you want to use an automated service? Or do you want to create a handcrafted newsletter style email that you send out on a regular basis?

Automated Email Subscription Widget

If you’re using Edublogs Pro, did you know you can add a simple email subscription widget on the sidebar of your blog?

Subscribers will receive an email automatically to alert them to new posts. You can choose to send a full post, complete with all images, or a post excerpt.

Find out how to activate the email subscription widget here.

Create An Email Newsletter

It’s becoming increasingly common for bloggers to create their own newsletter using an email service provider. 

There are many email service providers out there and many are free to use until you reach a certain number of subscribers. If you’re interested in comparing different email service providers, check out this guide from ProBlogger. 

When you use an email service provider, you can either:

• Automatically send out emails to people on your list when a new post is published.
• Create a personal email to your email list telling them about your new post(s). Generally, you might give an introduction to the post and ask them to click to visit your blog and read your post. You might send this out every time you publish a new post or at regular intervals (weekly, monthly etc.).

MailChimp Tips And Information

One of the most popular email service providers is MailChimp.

• It is free to use up to 250 subscribers.
• MailChimp uses a simple drag and drop editor and offers a range of different templates for the design of your newsletter.
• There are also different options for creating sign-up forms. You’ll probably want a sign-up form on the sidebar of your blog but you might also include it at the bottom of your blog posts, in a page on your blog, or as a ‘landing page’ that you can share on social media.

Check out the Getting Started With MailChimp guide for more information.

4) Encourage Others To Share Your Content

It’s ideal if people who are reading your posts share it with others. This can be a great way to find new audience members.

Everyone has their own tribe or network. If someone from your network introduces your work to others in their own network, the results can be exponential!

Consider putting a call to action in every blog post asking your readers to share it on social media or share it with colleagues if it resonated with them.

You can also use a variety of plugins to encourage your readers to share your posts.

Let’s take a look at Scriptless Social Sharing and Jetpack.

Scriptless Social Sharing

Scriptless Social Sharing is a lightweight plugin that adds social sharing buttons to your posts and pages, making it easy for readers to share your content.

You can display the sharing buttons above and/or below your posts, and choose which social networks you’d like to include.

Since it uses simple sharing links (no JavaScript), it’s a great option if you want fast, no-fuss sharing buttons.

You can also display the social sharing buttons using a shortcode, so you can place them anywhere on your site.

Jetpack Plugin

Jetpack is a powerful plugin that adds several different features and tools to your blog, some of these make it easier for others to share your posts.

Once you’ve activated Jetpack, you might like to activate:

• Publicize: Makes it easy to share your posts on social networks automatically when you publish a new post. Learn more.
• Sharing: Enables you to add sharing buttons to your posts so that your readers can easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. Learn more.

Check out our help guide for more instructions on setting up Jetpack.

5) Be An Audience

The final tip is a simple one that’s often overlooked: If you want to have an audience you need to be an audience.

This might involve:

• Subscribing to some blogs you like via email or RSS (e.g. Feedly). Or, following bloggers on social media.
• Sharing blog posts that resonate with you on social media; support other bloggers.
• Leave comments on posts that you enjoyed, leave you curious, or challenge your thinking.

Rather than being a passive reader, try to find a way to be active in your approach to really support others in your community (e.g. sharing, commenting, connecting).

Follow this approach in an authentic way and show genuine interest in others. Apart from learning a lot and building your PLN, you might find your audience begins to build naturally as well.

As you get to know other bloggers, you might also consider guest posting. It could introduce you to a new network of readers and you could be helping a fellow blogger too.

How does guest posting work?

• You might connect with someone who has a small but engaged network of readers.
• Arrange to write a relevant guest post on each other’s blogs.
• The guest post could include a short introduction with a link to your blog, and/or a bio at the bottom of the post.
• Perhaps some of those readers will start following you and vice versa. Win-win!

Conclusion: Stick With It!

If you ask any blogger who has a reasonable sized audience, they will no doubt tell you they started with a very small number of readers.

Building your audience takes time, patience, and a commitment to stick with it. Need help building momentum with your blog? Check out this post. 

Remember, the rewards will be worth it!

As George Couros said as he reflected on his 8 years of blogging,

Blogging has helped my learning grow significantly because I have done it consistently for myself, not necessarily for an audience. Knowing an audience is there though, has made me think a lot deeper about what I share though, and it helps me create a “360 Degree View” of my learning; I do my best to focus on all angles of what I am sharing before I share it.

Dean Shareski has also boldly stated, 

I’ve yet to hear anyone who has stuck with blogging suggest it’s been anything less than essential to their growth and improvement. I’ve no “data” to prove this but I’m willing to bet my golf clubs that teachers who blog are our best teachers.

We think so too.

Cybercriminals have firmly set their sights on higher education.

According to the 2025 UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey, about 91% of higher education institutions identified a cybersecurity breach or attack in the past year, much higher than the ~43% of UK businesses that reported the same.

This is no surprise: personal data (of everyone from alumni to staff to faculty), academic research, and cross-institutional records make attractive targets for hackers.

Several cybersecurity incidents have been publicly announced by higher-education institutions, such as:

• A University of Maryland database breach targeting the university’s network revealed the records of 287,570 affiliated personnel, students, faculty, and staff
• A hack of UCLA’s health system may have exposed records of more than 4 million patients
• A 2023 ransomware attack on the University of Manchester resulted in the theft and public leak of sensitive staff and student data after the university refused to pay the ransom

The information at risk is often that of young individuals laying the foundation for their education and professional lives. Imagine a hacker with access to your Social Security number while you’re still 18. How could that disrupt your ability to get a loan, buy a car or get a job? A decade later, what would happen when you apply for a housing mortgage?

Colleges and universities find themselves locked in a costly arms race as they try to install new tools and modify their tactics to mitigate the latest cyber attacks. However, the attackers continue to switch schemes, find ways around the tools, and hit different victims.

In other words, technological defenses can only go so far. No matter how versatile an institution’s cybersecurity software may be, its end users lead the line of defense during an attack.

That’s where security awareness comes in.

Awareness often takes a backseat due to the busy lives of faculty, and hectic schedule of students. However, it’s important to educate faculty, students, and staff about security awareness if higher education wants to stand a chance against digital crime.

What Can Higher Education Institutions Do to Raise Awareness?

Security is a success-driver when done right, and a considerable risk with potentially devastating consequences when it fails.

Here are five ways higher education institutions can raise awareness on security.

1) Simulated Phishing Exercises

Students, faculty, and staff can be educated on security via simulated phishing.

Universities can build phishing campaigns in-house, where IT can send out fake phishing emails with embedded links. Anyone who clicks on any of the links is redirected to a web page that informs them of the simulation exercise and provides further security-related information.

Alternatively, institutions can partner with organizations who offer phishing simulations in the form of videos, modules, and games. Most vendors will be able to customize awareness training to fit the needs of several types of institutions.

2) Data-Sharing Lectures

Students and faculty members share a variety of personal data through apps and other online services. Specific apps ask to access or use far more data than they need in exchange for free services, and some of them are designed by adversaries who are looking for gateways into institutions.

Personal data can be used to guess passwords and gain access to a device that may contain sensitive data about a college or university. Therefore, lectures should be arranged about data sharing via mobile apps and social networking sites, where the focus should be on reading user agreements to check the amount of data requested before someone downloads a new game or tries a new service.

3) Incentives

Incentives can help boost behavior changes, and industries have turned to using awards to make security-awareness education more interesting.

For instance, schools may award prizes to students, faculty, and staffers who flag a vulnerability, while the IT department may compete for a monetary reward based on who can identify the most security threats.

On the flip side, those who engage in unsecured browsing and device usage behavior will hear about it too. In fact, incentives may encourage staffers to take their institution’s security seriously and become part of the first line of defense against attackers.

4) Institution-Wide Security Hygiene

Everyone from students to external stakeholders should be educated on the significance of security hygiene.

Colleges need to start enforcing an acceptable-use policy, where all devices and workstations are locked down by stakeholders and signed out when they’re inactive. Training programs should be set up to educate end users about the importance of strong passwords and timely updates of devices’ operating systems.

Research what individuals require and create baseline rules for essential security controls that should be followed at all times. Students can also be asked to access university applications through a secure portal that keeps data secure and doesn’t place restrictions on student-owned devices.

5) Executive On-Campus Sponsorship

Get buy-in from campus leaders to ensure that a culture of security spreads through an institution. Top individuals, like the president of the student union, can be tasked with the executive responsibility to drive awareness and keep things on track, and they should report to the upper management directly.

This will give institutions the best opportunity to ensure that their security goals are balanced with other risks, like lack of student interest. To keep interest high, campus leaders can arrange events like a “security awareness day” with activities.

Conclusion

Security awareness offers several key benefits to higher-education institutions. It helps them facilitate behavioral change to mitigate potential risks, comply with laws, and reduce unnecessary cost.

However, instead of relying entirely on information-security professionals to prevent infiltration and minimize vulnerabilities, institutions should bank on the persons within to learn and digest new information about security.

By taking the measures mentioned above, schools will be in a better position to create a culture of continuous learning and security awareness.

Teaching and visuals naturally go together.

Visual aids have long been an effective way to engage students and support learning. Well-designed visuals also make it easier to communicate clearly with the wider school community.

In the past, teachers often had to choose between buying generic, impersonal resources or spending a lot of time creating their own.

Thankfully, there are now plenty of free online tools that make it easy to create professional-looking graphics. One of my favourites is Canva.

Canva isn’t just useful for teachers. We’re surrounded by visual media, and developing strong visual literacy skills is becoming increasingly important for students. Canva gives students the opportunity to communicate ideas and tell stories in creative and engaging ways.

In this post, I explain how to get started with the free version of Canva and share 10 examples of the types of resources you can create for your classroom.

And if you think you have zero design skills, don’t worry! It’s not a problem with Canva and I have some tips that will help you look like a pro in no time.

Canva Basics

This is Canva in a nutshell:

• Canva has millions of users worldwide and is popular in many industries, including education.
• Students under 13 can use Canva if they’re ‘appropriately supervised’.
• Canva is a web-based tool but there are also apps for Android and iOS.
• The free plan allows you to make unlimited creations and download them in high quality without watermarks. This sets Canva apart from some similar tools.
• The paid plans gives you access to more templates, images, and icons etc. It also allows you to resize your design without starting again (e.g. you might make something in A4 size then want a smaller version to share on social media). Additionally, you can download your designs with a transparent background (handy for logos, badges, buttons etc.).
• Canva uses a drag and drop interface which is very simple to use but like all tools, does require a little bit of playing around to develop fluency. It’s worth the investment in time!

Great news! The paid version of Canva is free for teachers and students. Read more here. 

Getting Started With Canva

The first thing you’ll need to do is sign up for a free Canva account.

Head to https://www.canva.com. From here, you can then sign up with your Facebook account, Google account, Apple account, or email.

There are a number of ways you can learn how to use Canva. Like any tool, spending some time ‘playing around’ can be helpful.

Guides for Beginners

This getting started guide introduces the basics of Canva and shows you how to work with colours, images, templates, and more.

Get an idea of how to use Canva in less than two minutes in this video. 

Check out Canva’s YouTube channel for more helpful video tutorials.

Quick Start Guide

This Quick Start Guide goes through:

• How to use the Canva homepage
• Finding your way around the Canva editor
• Creating your first design
• Publishing your design
• Design tips and tricks

Canva’s Design School

This is a resource hub for learning the basics of designing with Canva. The Teachers & Students section has workshops, lessons, and ideas from a community of education experts.

10 Designs You Can Create With Canva

You can create pretty much any graphic design you can think of using Canva.

Visit Canva’s template library to browse the templates you can adapt.

Let’s take a look at 10 sorts of designs that might be helpful in the classroom or wider school community.

1. Posters
2. Presentations
3. Infographics
4. Business cards
5. Certificates
6. Labels
7. Newsletters
8. Social graphics
9. Class logo
10. Blog header

1) Posters

Posters are staples for school communication and are a great way for students to demonstrate their learning.

You or your students can choose from pages and pages full of poster templates. There’s everything from inspirational quotes (like the one below), classroom rules or procedures, upcoming events, and so on.

2) Presentations

You might give presentations to staff, students, or parents, or perhaps your students present to the class from time to time.

There are options beyond PowerPoint and Google Slides; Canva offers lots of professional-looking templates that can blow your audience away!

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3) Infographics

All sorts of infographics, charts, timelines, or graphs can be created with Canva to clearly present information. Infographics not only serve as a great visual aid for teaching but can also spice up blog posts.

This post walks you through the process of creating your own effective infographic.

4) Business Cards

A business card can be a handy way to display your contact information and links to your virtual spaces, including your blog.

You could display a ‘business card’ as an image on the sidebar of your blog, or print some out, laminate them, attach a magnet to the back, and send them home!

Including both the URL and including a QR code offers your community choice. Many people love using QR codes because they can simply use their phone’s camera to scan the code and they’ll be on the website in seconds.

Tips on QR codes:

• You can create a QR code for your blog with a transparent background using a tool like this one from Pinetools.
• You can then upload the QR code as an image and add it to your design.
• Show students and families how to scan a QR code using the camera of their phone or tablet to go straight to the blog.

5) Certificates

Create professional looking certificates with just a few clicks using Canva templates. These might be useful for student awards, graduation, sports, or certificates of appreciation for members of the school community.

6) Labels

What teacher doesn’t like a nicely labeled classroom? Clear and attractive labels can help you and your student get organized while brightening up the learning environment.

Tip on size: With Canva, you can create labels for equipment, books, and stationery that are a perfect fit. From your Canva homepage, click on ‘Custom dimensions’ on the right-hand side.

You can enter your required width and height in pixels, inches, millimeters, or centimeters.

You can also explore Canva’s label hub that makes it easy to design all sorts of labels that you can print yourself or order professional prints.

7) Newsletters

Whether you’re designing a newsletter to print or distribute digitally, a clear and attractive design can really help engage your readers and get your message across.

Once you decide on a template that works well, you can re-use the design to build the consistent ‘brand’ of your class or school.

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Download

8) Social Graphics For Your Blog

Have you got a class blog or teacher blog? Adding images or graphics to your posts is really going to add impact and make your content easier to read.

Bloggers also often create a graphic to accompany their blog post which makes a social media post stand out.

The graphic is generally just the title of the blog post with an image and the blog URL — perhaps with blogger’s name or social media handle too.

Whenever we create a new post on The Edublogger, we create a simple graphic to go with it. For example:

9) Class Logo

Build community and morale by coming up with a class name and logo. Perhaps students could have a go at designing a logo and then put it to a vote!

You could display your logo on your blog, on your bulletin board, on notes home, and use it as an avatar if you have class Twitter or Instagram accounts etc.

10) Blog Header

Many teachers and students like to give their blog a personal touch by using a custom header image. It’s easy to make your own custom blog header using Canva.

The first thing you’ll need to do is go Appearance > Customize in your blog dashboard. If you don’t see the Header Image section in the Customizer, it means your theme doesn’t support the use of a custom header image.

When you click on Header Image in the Customizer, it will show you the dimensions of your header image. Make a note of this. For example:

You’ll then go to Canva and click on ‘Custom dimensions’. You’ll need to input your required dimensions (e.g. 1000 x 150 pixels as per the example above).

You’ll then have a blank canvas to work from. The first thing you might want to do is drag across a simple rectangular grid.

This will allow you to then find a free image to drag over and it will fill the space of your design.

Next, you can add text and other elements to complete your design.

When you’re done, download your design as JPEG or PNG and follow these instructions to upload it to your blog. Easy!

Design Tips

I’m no design expert but it’s something I really enjoy learning about. Here are my 5 top tips for designing with Canva! I’d love to hear yours too.

1. Less is more. Cliche but true. It’s easy to ‘over-design’ when there are SO many images, shapes, fonts, patterns etc. to use. Try not to use too many colors, keep text minimal, don’t use too many different fonts, and generally avoid clutter.
2. Be consistent. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you start a new design. In fact, consistency helps to create your ‘brand’. Consider sticking with the same sorts of fonts and colors etc.
3. Can you read it? If you’re using text, make sure it can be read easily. Sometimes you need to change the colors of your design. Or if you’re putting text over an image, place it over a solid or semi-transparent shape. Alternatively, putting a filter over the image might help make the text stand out.
4. Keep it neat. You want all the elements in your design to line up nicely. Canva shows you grid lines to make alignment easy, although it can sometimes take a little playing around to get your design just right!
5. Look around. Once you start designing, it can be helpful to look around you for examples of designs you like. Canva’s template library is a great place to start! You can easily adapt your favorite designs to make them your own.

How Did Canva Come About?

The story of Canva began when 19 year old Australian Melanie Perkins found that students were struggling to learn the basics of graphic design.

Melanie partnered with Cliff Obrecht to launch Fusion Books, an online design tool that made it easy for students and teachers to create their own yearbooks.

Realizing this technology could be used more broadly, they launched Canva.

There is a lot written about the story of Canva. You can follow the timeline of events on their website or listen to this interesting interview with Melanie on NPR’s popular How I Built This podcast.

If you’re using Canva with students it could be interesting to share the story of how the company came about.

Melanie and Cliff were not long out of high school themselves when they dived into their entrepreneurial journey. No doubt they could offer inspiration for young people everywhere!

This is a guest post from Roslyn Green who is a secondary school (high school) teacher from Melbourne, Australia.

Roslyn uses Edublogs and CampusPress to blog with a number of her classes a variety of ways which she explained in a popular post on The Edublogger in 2018.

Since her last post, Roslyn has been investigating different ways to embed eLearning options on her blogs. She has tried out a number of free websites that allow the development of interactive activities for students (online worksheets, games, and so on).

In this post, Rosyln goes through six different free tools that you might find useful to make your class blog or website more interactive. They are:

• Flippity
• H5P
• Playbuzz
• LearningApps
• Quizizz
• Tinycards

Back To Basics!

If you’re new to blogging, you might need help with the basics before diving into these tools.

• Don’t have a class blog or website yet? This free self-paced course will walk you through the process of getting started!
• Don’t know how to embed content on your blog? It’s simple once you get the hang of it. This tutorial will show you what to do. Note: Embedding can’t be allowed on free blogs due to misuse by spammers.
• Don’t know how to add links to your text on your blog posts or pages? Check out this tutorial. 

Now on to Roslyn’s post…

A Message From Roslyn

Dear Colleagues, Teachers, and Fellow Bloggers,

The six activity options that I have introduced below are relatively easy for teachers to develop, yet engaging and absorbing for students to use. Furthermore, they can all be embedded or linked in your blog posts in order to vary classroom work, consolidate student learning and facilitate differentiation where necessary.

Some of these activities are almost guaranteed to transform even the most dreaded afternoon class into a walk in the park.

I hope you will find the websites as useful, varied and intuitive as I have.

All the best from Roslyn Green

My own blogs: History | Psychology | German

1) Flippity https://www.flippity.net

The Flippity site is a treasure trove. It allows you to serve up interactive activities with limited time outlay on your part.

With its support, you can make flashcards, provide matching games, generate bingo cards, print crosswords and try many other options. All you will need to get started is a Gmail account and access to Google Docs.

Essentially, you can make a set of flashcards on any topic and then, from this single data set, generate several other activities. Here is a clickable example:

An Introduction to the Renaissance

Once you have created your flashcard set by following the instructions at https://www.flippity.net, you can generate a number of exercises and games to consolidate learning of vocabulary and understanding of concepts.

For example, you can get your students to play a matching game on their devices. It looks like the screenshot below and is dangerously addictive.

There is a host of other options, but my favourite one is the bingo card generator which allows you to print a set of randomised cards OR give your students a link that brings up a bingo screen on their own devices.

Here is a bingo link for the set above, along with a screen capture to show how this looks on students’ screens.

Students always ask to play bingo games “one more time”.

The advantage of this option is that the teacher can go beyond the factual information in the cards and begin to focus on concepts. For example, “Mark a picture that demonstrates the Renaissance fascination with the human body” could lead to several choices, as could “Find an example of the Renaissance interest in realistic depictions of nature”.

In this way, students can choose whichever option brings them closer to BINGO! — and scarcely notice that they are learning.

2) H5P https://h5p.org

This site was my best find in 2018. It is free, interactive, modern-looking and intuitive.

In a single presentation or quiz, you can introduce multiple choice questions, fill-the-blank texts, drag the answer to the blank and various other question types.

An online presentation can include embedded questions of various kinds.

Below is an embedded example of a presentation quiz. Click on it to try it out.

History: The Anglo-Saxons and the Early English Language

As you can see, this embedded quiz looks like part of your page or post.

A particularly addictive type of question is drag and drop. This allows you to create matching games in which students are required to classify or match up answers, pictures, words or statements.

Once you’ve mastered the process of creating these questions, which is a little tricky at first, you can create:

• Diagrams to be labelled
• Timelines with pictures, dates, and descriptions of events
• Scientific classification puzzles
• Vocabulary lists

In short, you can create whatever inspires you and engages your students.

Psychology: Distinguishing Behaviours, Thoughts and Feelings

The H5P option is much more complex and cerebral than Flippity. It is ideal for presenting more challenging written material and consolidating vocabulary through “cloze” questions. It is even useful for introducing new content.

For instance, I like the idea of an “either-or” introductory quiz, in which students have to do a fair bit of guessing and receive feedback on each answer — followed by a quick vocabulary check, as in this example:

The Life of Peasants

You can see all my quizzes at this link (and clone them if you wish in order to speed up your own quiz-making).

3) Playbuzz https://www.playbuzz.com

The Playbuzz site allows you to create an interactive story for your students by presenting information with pictures and text and posing questions with built-in feedback for readers.

In the process of creation, you can choose from a range of presentation screens, such as:

• A quotation screen
• Your own text
• Embedded videos
• “Trivia” screens that permit you to include questions for students to answer
• “Convo” screen through which you can present a range of different viewpoints

Below is a screenshot of a “convo” screen at the end of my Playbuzz story about the Mongol attacks on Japan in the 13th century.

Playbuzz could, therefore, be used not only by teachers but also by students as an alternative to a more traditional assignment format or as an idea for students’ own blogs.

It provides a multimedia story-telling program which would be engaging for students to use, although it requires time and concentration to try out and master all the options available.

I used the “convo screen” above as a springboard for students to write comments from 3-4 different perspectives. This worked well as a prompt for student blog comments on this post.

As you can see from the collage of screens from my story below, a Playbuzz story can be part text, part video, part quiz and part revision: whatever you want it to be.

Note: It is possible to embed a Playbuzz “story” into your post or page. Since its full length is displayed, however, I have avoided doing so here.

4) LearningApps https://learningapps.org

I mentioned the next three options briefly in my blogging story. Each one deserves a closer examination.

The LearningApps site is free, varied, fairly intuitive and very reliable. You will find a variety of “apps” or quiz styles there, such as crosswords, label the diagram, multiple choice, fill the gap and so forth.

This site is handy for revision of material already covered and ideal for promoting reading and comprehension of key terms. Your “apps” can be embedded in your site or provided to students via a link or a QR code.

It is important to provide HELP options so that students can click on the “lightbulb help button” if they get bogged down, especially when completing crosswords. In this way, they have a chance of figuring out the answer if it doesn’t come to mind immediately, which provides another independent learning step.

Example of a Crossword:

Students often work well together to solve a crossword and I find that this is an enjoyable way for them to focus on keywords and consolidate new vocabulary.

Here are examples of some other types of apps that can be created and embedded in your site via LearningApps:

• Label a Diagram: Structure of a Neuron (Psychology)
• Label a Picture: Mein Zimmer (German)
• Multiple Choice Quiz: Penetrating the Human Mystery (Psychology)
• Matching Grid: Anne Frank – Wortliste (German)
• Cloze Task: MLK – Ich habe einen Traum (German)

5) Wayground https://wayground.com 

This site is based on multiple choice questions, like Kahoot!, but with some valuable additional options.

One option is that students can play alone or against each other. I usually get them to play alone before they play competitively and I make the competition optional.

The games can also be set up with or without a time limit. Questions may be viewed as a presentation or as flashcards before the quiz is attempted, which provides an extra step to learning and mastery for weaker students.

After the game, students can review their answers.

Finally, it is possible to print the questions, which can also benefit students who need extra thinking and reading time.

An added feature is the “memes” sets that you can either choose or create yourself. In this way, students receive encouraging and amusing feedback after each question.

As you can see from the screenshots above and the memes below, this site is visually engaging, as well as providing an entertaining challenge for students.

My example of a Wayground for a unit on Ancient Rome: Vesuvius and Pompeii.

6) Tinycards https://tinycards.duolingo.com

This flashcard-making platform is based on the Duolingo language learning concept.

The option of adding diagrams and pictures, the sheer intuitive simplicity of the interface and the interactivity of the “lessons” that are generated are all reasons to consider using this website and placing links to your sets on your blog.

Students can also join up and create their own sets of flashcards. Consequently, Tinycards can be useful as an introductory task (you make a set for the students), as a challenge (the students create a set themselves) or as a revision strategy for older, more independent students.

I favour creating cards with a “cloze” style of task in which the student supplies a single key term (or selects it).

Conclusion

We thank Roslyn for sharing these six tools and generously providing us with her own examples.

We know that practical and free online tools are so useful for teachers who are always looking for new ways to engage students and help them learn.

The great thing about a blog is that it is simply a blank canvas and web tools can really bring it alive!

Who used to see the work you created at school?

For many of us, the audience was small — maybe just the teacher, a few classmates, or family members (if the work didn’t end up crumpled at the bottom of a school bag!).

Today, things are very different. Students can share their work with a wide and varied audience through blogs and digital portfolios.

That’s an exciting opportunity — but how do you actually find that audience? Publishing online doesn’t automatically mean people will see it.

In this post, we’ll explore six effective ways to help your students connect with a genuine audience for their blog posts or online creations.

What Are The Benefits Of An Authentic Audience?

An authentic audience is powerful. When students know someone beyond the teacher will see their work, they can be motivated to push themselves and work harder.

This is something Clive Thompson wrote about in Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.

Alan November is also well-known for suggesting,

“Stop saying hand it in, start saying publish it.” This paradigm shift from an audience of one to an audience of the world will inspire more students to achieve up to their potential, while instilling a life-long passion for genuine learning.

Making schoolwork purposeful can really impact student motivation and engagement.

Furthermore, when students have an audience for their blog posts, readers can provide further information, opinions, suggest resources, seek answers to questions and so on. This can drive a cycle of further learning and development.

The Role Of The Teacher

In the past, the teacher was the audience. Now, the teacher can help their students find their own audiences.

This doesn’t have to be a daunting process. You can start small and over time build up to establishing global audiences that can offer diverse perspectives.

Let’s go through six options for finding an audience for students’ blog posts, starting with the simplest options.

1) Fellow Classmates

If all or some of the students in your class have their own blog, one of the best starting points is to encourage the students to be an audience for each other.

Teach students about the give and take nature of blogging and being part of an online community. This involves producing content, reading content, commenting, reflecting, and perhaps even using insights from others to construct new blog posts.

You might do this informally and just ask your students to choose a classmate’s blog to read and comment on.

Alternatively, you might like to set up a more structured arrangement where students work in small peer groups to mentor one another. For example, some teachers create blog mentor groups where students are assigned to read and comment on each other’s posts regularly.

If you’re using a class management tool like My Class, you can even generate participation reports to track which students are engaging with their peers.

Many teachers also find success with peer editing activities, where students provide feedback on drafts before publishing — helping to build both confidence and writing skills.

2) Family Members

Parents and family members can offer a ready-made audience for student work, however, some education and ongoing encouragement is very important.

In 2017, we published a Guide to Involving Parents with Blogs.

Here are some key points:

• Family members won’t be willing or able to get involved in blogging if they don’t know anything about it. Education is key.
• You can try offering information about the blogs and how to comment via a printed navigation guide, pages on your class blog, emails, newsletters, an information evening, a how-to video, Family Blogging Afternoons, or Family Blogging Month.
• Regular encouragement throughout the year will ensure family members don’t forget about their role as an audience member.
• Particularly enthusiastic volunteers could become reps who help get others in the community involved.

Your ready-made audience doesn’t only consist of parents, of course. There may be other family members, including grandparents, who would love to become part of your blogging community but just need guidance or encouragement.

3) Team Blogging

Another great way to help your students build their audience is to form reciprocal relationships with other blogging classes near or far.

How many other classes you connect with is up to you. You might decide to just team up with one other class, although a popular choice is to collaborate with a group of four classes that take turns reading and commenting on one another’s blog posts.

To get the most out of team blogging, you want to make a genuine commitment to read and comment on one another’s blog posts over a set period of time, e.g., a month, a semester, or a school year.

Often, the focus class is rotated each week. So if you have four classes, as demonstrated in the diagram below, each class will receive comments for one week and then write comments for the other three weeks.

Where to find classes to team up with?

Firstly, decide whether you’re looking for a class where every student has their own blog or there is just one class blog.

Next, you’ll want to consider what age range would be suitable to work with.

Twitter (X) is a great place for teachers to connect and find classes with similar blogging projects.

Once you’ve found a class that looks like a good match, reach out to the teacher via Twitter or by commenting on a post on their class blog. They might even know other classes interested in joining in.

4) Projects

There are a number of structured projects you can join to help your students connect with others, build their network, and find an authentic audience for their work.

Here are a couple of great options:

• The Global Read Aloud (A 6 week project held during October/November. Classes connect around shared readings of books)
• ePals (Find ‘pen pals’ in other classes around the world)

5) Your PLN

There are many reasons why it’s great to have your own PLN (Professional Learning Network) as a teacher. The graphic below summarizes just some of the reasons. These are explained in more detail in this post. 

If you’re not familiar with PLNs or how to go about becoming a connected educator, we have a free, self-paced course that can help.

Having your own PLN is a key way to also help your students connect with others and start developing their own networks.

What would this look like in terms of helping your students find an audience for their work? Here are just a few examples:

• Publish a tweet to share your student blog posts and invite comments.
• Reach out to someone who works in a field that your student is interested in to help extend their learning further.
• Set up a Facebook group with members of your global PLN who are interested in sharing students’ work and helping to find authentic audiences.

6) Make Sites Findable On The Web

Outside of education, most people land on a website because Google sent them there.

For older or more advanced students, you might start having a discussion about finding an audience organically. Together you could explore how people who publish online outside of education go about this.

Students might even start creating content that people will be looking for in Google. To aid this process, you could:

• Ensure your blog is indexed in search engines like Google (Dashboard > Settings > Reading > Allow search engines to index this site). Note: this is only available with Edublogs Pro and CampusPress accounts to prevent misuse by spammers.
• Install the Simple SEO plugin and type in a ‘Meta Description’ about the site and posts that will show up in Google results.
• Assign posts to tags and categories to help readers find what they’re interested in reading.
• Use Google Analytics to see who’s visiting your site, where they find your site, and what they’re most interested in. This data could provide inspiration for content that you’d like to update or expand upon. Learn about setting up Google Analytics for your Edublogs Pro or CampusPress account here.

As an active voice on the web, students can become part of rich conversations that are much wider than their classroom. They can learn that their insights and ideas are valuable.  

Conclusion

Helping your students find an authentic audience for their work might take a little time and effort to set up but the rewards will be worth it!

Students can learn to think beyond grades and pleasing the teacher, and start contributing their voice, knowledge, and resources to a global community.

How do you find an audience for your students’ work online? If you have any tips or ideas to share, we’d love to hear from you!

Related Reading

50 New Blog Post Ideas For Students

My Class: Student Blogging Made Easy

10 Ways To Introduce Your Students To Blogging

There are countless fantastic tools available within Google Drive — including Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Forms, and Google Sheets.

All of these tools are free, web-based, and used daily by people across classrooms, homes, and workplaces worldwide.

One tool you may not have explored yet is Google Drawings.

You might have heard of it but wondered what it’s actually useful for.

If you’re a blogger, Google Drawings can be the perfect tool for creating visuals that make your site stand out.

And for teachers or students, it’s a brilliant way to express learning in a creative and engaging way.

This post explains:

What is Google Drawings?

How to create a Google Drawing

How to embed a Google Drawing into a blog post or page

Ideas For Using Google Drawings In The Classroom

What is Google Drawings?

Google Drawings is a very versatile tool that allows you to make all sorts of graphic designs and publications.

Canva is another popular tool for graphic design and we have a guide to using Canva if you’d like to learn more.

Many people also use Google Slides for creating designs but there are differences. Check out our blog post about Google Slides.

In this Venn diagram, Tony Vincent shows us how Google Drawings and Google Slides are the same and different.

Be sure to follow Tony on Twitter or Instagram as he often shares tips for using Google tools and other tech tools.

Tony has also started a new initiative called Shapegrams which is a great way for students to learn design skills, problem solving, and creativity through Google Drawings. You don’t need to have experience as the activities include instructional videos from Tony.

Shapegrams are reproducible pictures with instructional videos, design tips, and extension activities. They’re great for bell work, stations, extra time, and enrichment. #GoogleEdu

There’s a new Shapegram every week! https://t.co/jA6ox3lubm pic.twitter.com/nXwxt67lWX

— Shapegrams (@shapegrams) August 25, 2019

Quick facts about Google Drawings:

• It’s free.
• Your creation starts with a blank canvas of any size.
• You access Google Drawings through the web or via a Chrome app that can be used offline (works best on a computer).
• Multiple users can open and edit drawings simultaneously in real time. They can also engage in chat.
• You can make a Drawing with many components. You can add images to your canvas as well as shapes, arrows, scribbles, text, and more.
• There are many sharing options for your Google Drawing. It can be private, you can share it with select people, or you can share it publicly on the web. You can choose whether people can view or edit your Drawing.
• Your Drawing is automatically saved as you work on it.
• Google Drawings can be embedded in blogs and websites. They can also be downloaded as a JPEG, PNG, PDF etc.
• You can insert a Google Drawing into a Google Doc as explained here by Jake Miller.

Here’s a graphic summary of the above. Feel free to share it with colleagues who want to learn more about Google Drawings.

How To Start A Google Drawing

You’ll need a Google Account to access Google Drawings.

If you use Gmail or other Google products, this will be the same username/password. Teachers might also have a school Google account.

If you haven’t got a Google account yet, you can sign up here:

https://accounts.google.com/signup

Google Drive is the place where your Google Drawings are stored. It’s also one of the ways you can start a new Google Drawing.

You access your Google Drive on the web through this URL:

https://drive.google.com

Click on New in the top left-hand corner. Then click on More and then Google Drawings.

Alternatively, you can type https://docs.google.com/drawings into your browser or access Drawings via the Chrome app. If you use the app you can access Drawings when you’re offline.

How To Make And Save A Google Drawing

You’ll notice when you start a new Google Drawing, using the methods described above, you will be presented with a blank canvas.

Creating a drawing is straightforward. Here are the basics of creating and saving your work.

1) Open Google Drawings

Access drawings via your Google Drive or the Chrome App. Alternatively, just type https://docs.google.com/drawings into your browser.

2) Change your image size (optional)

If you want your image to be a certain size (e.g. the size of your blog header), you can change this in File > Page Setup > Custom. You can enter the dimensions you’re after in inches, centimeters, points, or pixels.

Tip: If you’re making a blog header, you’ll find the required dimensions in Customizer as demonstrated here.

3) Consider your background color

By default, the background of your Google Drawing will be transparent. That means there will be no background when you download your image as PNG or JPEG.

If you want your image to have a different color background (or even solid white), right-click on your canvas and select background.

Then you can play around with solid backgrounds or gradients.

4) Create your design

Add the text, images, shapes, lines, charts and more that you’d like on your design by navigating the options under Insert.

5) Save your design as an image

When you’re ready, go to File > Download as > JPEG image or PNG image. Save your image to your device.

You can also save your image as a PDF if it’s something you’d like to print or distribute.

You’ll then have an image file that you can print or use in your digital creations including your blog.

You add an image to a blog post (or page) by selecting the “Add media” button from the top of the post editor. These instructions walk you through the process.

Here is a simple blog header image I made with Google Drawings.

Learn More About Google Drawings

If you’d like to be walked through the process of adding different elements to your Google Drawings canvas, set aside 8 minutes and check out this tutorial by Mike Harmon (HLModTech).

There are two other lessons in this series if you’d like to learn even more from Mike.

Ideas For Using Google Drawings In The Classroom

Google Drawings is an ideal tool for students and teachers to make images that they can print or use digitally.

Creations can be downloaded as JPEGs and PNGs. Drawings can also be embedded straight into a blog post or page (as demonstrated above).

Examples of images you could create in Google Drawings:

• Blog headers
• Other blog images (e.g. see the example of the promotional graphic at the start of this post. These are great to share on social media).
• Certificates
• Comics
• Photos with captions
• Flowcharts, mindmaps, or other graphic organizers
• How-to tutorials
• Classroom labels

Let’s take a look at some more examples of how teachers and students are using Google Drawings.

Avatars or characters

Sheri Edwards has created a tutorial that explains how to make an avatar using Google Drawings. Sheri has an additional post worth reading with some tips for using Google Drawings.

Classroom Ideas From Eric Curts

Eric has a fabulous website called Control Alt Achieve where he shares really practical tips and resources about Google products. Be sure to check out all his Google Drawings resources. 

They’re all shared under a Creative Commons license that allows you to use the resources freely with attribution.

This presentation is jam packed with tips and ideas.

All About Me By Roxi Thompson

US teacher Roxi, had her students use Google Drawings to create a graphic about themselves during the first week of school.

This could be a useful activity to introduce students to basic Google Drawings functions. It could be ideal to display on an About page and help build classroom community.

Here is an example from Roxi. Her blog post has some student examples that could be handy to show your class.

Tweetable Examples

Twitter is full of excellent examples of the projects that are happening in classrooms around the world.

Here are some noteworthy Google Drawings projects that might work in your own classroom!

@ls_teacher’s 3rd grade math students using Google Drawings to make arrays @BraggSchoolCSD #WeAreChesterNJ pic.twitter.com/XTb6j5pPXa

— Brad Currie (@TheBradCurrie) October 10, 2019

We are getting ready for Canadian School Library Day!! Our Grade 5 Library Leaders are exploring how they can use Google Drawings to create a poster all about our library space. @CdnSchoolLibrar #peelEML pic.twitter.com/2PdhzuHTtn

— LarkspurLLC (@LarkspurLibLC) October 9, 2019

Today we are making physical maps using #googledrawings #polyline feature to make physical maps. We are learning as we go, and having fun along the way. #thisisMEtsd #talawandaempowers @TSDMarshall @TalawandaSTEM pic.twitter.com/wT3AjKw3eK

— Lexie Withrow (@MissWithrow217) October 9, 2019

Third graders @PembertonElementary used Google Drawings to create charts and diagrams (English SOL 3.6c) about rounding (Math SOL 3.1b) and animal adaptations (Science SOL 3.4) https://t.co/ixPXR1oKKa pic.twitter.com/JXUhWNtuAS

— David Clough (@djdaverave) October 9, 2019

So this is why I’m not in advertising. We’ll be using Google Drawings with Yr4 to create Welsh Tourism posters this afternoon @stwinsholywell Check out my cool example.

Hoping the children will learn advantages of PNG, rotate, crop masks, order, image import, resize & gradients pic.twitter.com/Qr300wEWL3

— Rough Cuts (@roughcuts1) October 9, 2019

Trying to come up with some engaging ways to practice our phonics and spelling using Google Drawings! #centers #benchmark @FairviewPanther @teachmeLori pic.twitter.com/xz840UsIRm

— Laura Obando (@ABCClassroom) October 8, 2019

Mosaic Lighthouses made using #GoogleDrawing #GoogleDrawings #ccsd1deskpub https://t.co/HZdiyzvqEo pic.twitter.com/Mn6HmcwAs1

— DawnTechTeacher (@DawnTechTeacher) October 3, 2019

A sampling of the ecosystem food web projects Ss have created. @TSDMarshall #thisismetsd #TalawandaEmpowers pic.twitter.com/aVR5Qx0PX7

— Kari Croucher (@KariCroucher) October 10, 2019

Learning about the design process in computer class, inventing technologies to help others, designing in Google Drawings, & writing about the specs. Delran Ss prove the future is bright!@maryjohutch @Delran_Super @DelranSTEM @DeSimoneChristy @DemicheleErica pic.twitter.com/xS7hrBeLb2

— Dan the Computer Man (@DantheComputer1) October 3, 2019

Conclusion

Google Drawings is a versatile tool that has so much potential for bloggers and students of all ages.

Whether you need a graphic for a blog post, page, widget or blog header, Google Drawings is a handy solution that’s free and intuitive to use.

Many teachers and students enjoy embedding their Google Drawings into their blog posts. Sharing work with an authentic audience yields many benefits!

How are you using Google Drawings?

Do you have any tips or examples to share?

Do you have any questions about Google Drawings?

Leave a comment below. We’d love to hear from you.

Further Reading

You might also be interested in reading:

A Beginner’s Guide To Google Slides In The Classroom

A Beginner’s Guide To Google Photos

Canva In The Classroom: Getting Started, Example Designs, And Tips!

Six Tools To Create Interactive Learning Content On Your Blog

Not too long ago, when educators needed ideas, support, or simply a place to debrief, their choices were pretty limited.

Even if you managed to catch up with colleagues in the teachers’ lounge, it was easy to still feel uninspired or isolated. Maybe you were the only art teacher, librarian, or tech coach in your school, and connecting with like-minded peers in other schools or districts often felt like a daunting task.

And for many, the teachers’ lounge wasn’t a hub of professional dialogue at all—it was more likely a spot to wrestle with the photocopier while finishing a cold cup of coffee.

Today, Facebook groups have stepped in to change this. These online communities allow educators to feel more connected, supported, and inspired than ever, with access to professional conversations and resources around the clock.

In this post, we’ll explore what Facebook groups are, how educators and schools are using them, highlight five popular examples, and introduce our latest pop-up Facebook group.

What Is A Facebook Group?

Facebook groups are simply online spaces to communicate with others about shared interests.

There are all sorts of Facebook groups. Some might involve only people you know like your extended family, sports team, colleagues, or school community.

Other Facebook groups are for strangers who are interested in uniting on a common topic. Basically think of any topic, interest, or need and there is probably a Facebook group up and running — parenting, fitness, business, politics, local news, television shows, buy and sell, sports, celebrity fan clubs and so much more.

Of course, Facebook groups are very popular with educators as well.

Facebook Group Quick Facts

Here is an overview of how Facebook Groups work:

• You can only join or create a Facebook group if you have a Facebook account (but don’t worry, if you don’t want to post on your Facebook profile and add friends, you don’t have to).
• Any Facebook user can create a group.
• Some Facebook groups are public but many are private (only members can see who’s in the group and what they post).
• You often need to request permission to join a Facebook group.
• Some Facebook groups are visible so any user can search for them, others are hidden and you need an invitation to join.
• You can join up to 6000 Facebook groups! We have a feeling that would just be a little hard to keep track of.
• Facebook groups have administrators and moderators that are nominated by the group creator. These individuals might post discussion threads, approve membership requests, and ensure everyone is adhering to the group rules.
• Groups can be ongoing or more of a “pop-up” short term group for a certain event or course.

Facebook Pages Vs Groups

Confused about Facebook pages Vs groups?

Pages are like public profiles for brands, businesses, and publishers. Anyone can see the page and like or follow it if they wish. Facebook users can also comment on posts they see on pages and/or share page posts with their friends.

Groups are more engaged communities and they’re often private. They’re a popular way to generate conversations, connections, and support.

This is a simplified version of how you might distinguish between Facebook pages and groups.

Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg, has been prioritizing Facebook groups over recent years and they’re growing in popularity.

Be sure to like our Edublogs Facebook page if you’re not already!

How Do Facebook Groups Work?

Like any community, it can take work to keep a Facebook group active and engaged.

The administrators and moderators might work behind the scenes to keep the group alive. They might pose interesting open-ended questions for the group to respond to, or encourage the people who are posting with responses.

If you’re considering joining a Facebook group, you’ll be able to see how many posts there have been recently. This will give you an idea of whether the group is active and whether it’s worth your while joining.

There are pros and cons to smaller more tightly connected groups, and larger busier groups. Joining a smaller group might mean you get to know members and form closer connections. Larger groups might offer more anonymity but there will probably always be someone around to interact with.

When you go to the Facebook group, you’ll see this information under “Activity”. It will be visible even if you’re not a group member.

So what might you see in a Facebook group? Well, groups house all sorts of content — discussion threads, images, videos, and files. Some groups allow sales posts.

Once you’re a member of a Facebook group you can read other people’s posts and replies. Some people tend to lurk and simply consume the content in groups, while others are more involved and regularly post questions, updates, and replies.

Many people find the more they put in to Facebook groups, the more they get out!

How Can Schools Use Facebook Groups?

There are many ways that school communities around the world are embracing Facebook groups.

Some approaches are led by the school (perhaps linked to the official school Facebook page), and others are more grassroots groups set up by parents or students.

Some schools and communities set up separate Facebook groups for:

• General school news
• Specific grade levels or classes (e.g. “Year 2” or “Class 2B”)
• Sporting teams
• Extra-curricular groups, e.g. musical production, cheerleading etc.
• Event organisation, e.g. school fair, or graduation ceremony
• Uniform or textbook buy and sell
• Homework help
• Alumni

Managing school Facebook groups is an important topic of discussion amongst communities. Many schools are now realizing they can’t prevent the creation of groups so need to put guidelines in place to ensure groups are used positively.

Some schools include Facebook groups in their social media policy to ensure all group administrators understand the importance of online safety and follow the school guidelines. Often schools might make it clear via their official channels of communication (e.g. newsletter), that Facebook groups are not used for official school communication.

It’s a balancing act for schools. If they can’t control the group content, they might be wary. On the other hand, any avenue that is connecting the community can’t be ignored.

If this is an issue that your school has juggled, we’d love to hear from you in a comment.

5 Popular Facebook Groups For Educators

Like the idea of joining some Facebook groups but unsure where to start? Here are a few groups that educators in our community enjoy. We’d love you to leave a comment with your own suggestions.

Tip: As you join and interact with groups, you may find Facebook suggests other groups you might enjoy on the right side of your screen. For example,

1) Teach With Tech

Type of Group: Private (visible)

URL: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TeachWithTechGroup

Creator: Danielle Weinberg Knight

Members: 61,000+

This is a group to post questions related to edtech, devices, sites, apps, extensions, and technology in the classroom. Members are encouraged to post successful lessons, activities, takeaways, and so on.

2) Technology Teacher Tribe With Brittany Washburn

Type of Group: Private (visible)

URL: https://www.facebook.com/groups/techteachertribe/

Creator: Brittany Washburn

Members: 33,000+

This is closed group for teachers who teach technology or love using it in their classroom. It allows for teachers to connect with others around the world, ask questions and share their own experiences.

3) STEM Teachers Group

Type of Group: Private (visible)

URL: https://www.facebook.com/groups/STEMteachertribe

Creator: Meredith Anderson

Members: 45,000+

STEM Teachers Group is for educators, homeschooling parents, and makerspace staff. It’s a place to share STEM ideas and connect.

4) Fitness for Teachers

Type of Group: Private (visible)

URL: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1687288924866712/

Creator: Jennifer Gibbons

Members: 72,000+

Groups for educators don’t have to be solely about curriculum and learning. This group is a place for teachers looking to incorporate fitness into their busy lifestyle.

5) Teacher Memes

Type of Group: Private (visible)

URL: https://www.facebook.com/groups/716962268473473/

Creators: Amy Margaret and Krista Cromer

Members: 368,000+

Educators sure need a sense of humor to deal with their job! Online or offline, teachers have always relied on each other for a laugh and boost of positivity. This group is a place to share funny memes that other teachers will relate to.

There is a language warning so don’t join this group if you’re easily offended.

Over To You

Any questions about Facebook groups? Leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

Do you use Facebook groups? Can you recommend any other groups for educators? We’d love to hear from you.

If you’re like me, you’re always on the lookout for the quickest way to track down information or solve everyday problems.

Google Lens is my go-to tool for recognizing objects, plants, and animals — but it can do so much more. From instantly translating text while you’re traveling to copying text from textbooks, PDFs, or printed pages, it offers quick solutions at your fingertips.

It’s simple to use, completely free, and surprisingly, many people still don’t realize how powerful this tool can be. That’s where we come in!

In this beginner’s guide to Google Lens, we’ll show you how it works, how to get started, and share plenty of tips and tricks to make the most of it.

Google Lens also connects with Google Photos. If you’d like to dive deeper into Google Photos, don’t miss our ultimate guide. 

The Basics – What is Google Lens?

Google Lens is image recognition software released in 2017 by Google. It was originally designed to provide relevant information about an object using visual analysis.

It’s a fast free solution for reading and understanding information within images. The latest version of Google Lens has five modes:

• Auto: Lens automatically provides relevant search results based on the image it sees.
• Translate:  Point at text and Lens provides a translation on top of the original words.
• Text: Point Lens at the text you want to copy.
• Shopping:  Point Lens at an item that you would like to find in a store or scan the barcode.
• Dining:  Scan a menu and Lens can highlight which dishes are popular, provide reviews, or tell you more about a particular dish if you tap on the text.  You can also scan your receipt to get Lens to calculate the tip and split the bill.

How To Get Started With Google Lens

On Android phones, you can install the Google Lens app from the Play Store, use it inside Google Photos or use the Google Lens icon in your Google Assistant.

On iOS phones, you can access using the Google Lens icon inside Google Photos and the Google app.

Identifying objects, plants, and animals

Google Lens is the fastest way of identifying plants, flowers, animals (or their breed), identifying an object and how it might be used!  It can also be used for exploring popular landmarks and places to learn about them and their historical facts when traveling.

Lens options vary depending on your device so I’ve decided to demonstrate how to identify objects using Google Lens inside the Google Photo app since you can use this option on both an Android and iOS.

Here’s a quick video to show how it’s done:

You identify an object, plant, or animal by analyzing a photo you’ve taken inside Google Photos as follows:

1. Open Google Photos.

2. Tap on photo of the object and then tap on Google Lens icon.

3. This launches Google Lens which is their image recognition software designed to bring up relevant information using visual analysis.

4. Results are displayed below the photo.

5. Tap on an image in the related results to find out more.

This search was to find out what the item my husband received in a gift basket was used for.  It had us all stumped!

The answer was:

It’s a ‘Click on leaf-shaped colander’ that you use as follows:

Copy-Paste Text From Textbooks and Documents

Google Lens’ ability to copy-paste text means you now have a fast way to copy study notes from a textbook, or from a document, into your own document.  Its OCR (Optical Character Recognition) allows you to read any character from an image and turn it into editable text.

The easiest way to copy-paste text is by using the Google Lens app if you have an Android phone. The alternative option is to use the Google Lens icon inside Google Photos if you are using an iOS phone.

Here’s a quick video to show how it is done:

Here’s how to copy-paste text using the Google Lens app:

1. Open the Google Lens app (Android only).

2. Point your phone’s camera over all the text you want to scan (so it is all highlighted).

3. Tap on the Text icon.

4. Tap on Select All (or you can tap on sections of text you want to select).

5. Tap on Copy text.

6. Open up the app or document you wish to copy the text into (I use Google Docs on my phone).

7. Long press the cursor in your document to summon the selection menu.

8. Tap Paste.

9. Save the document and open up on the desktop to make edits to the text (if needed). My example needed editing as I was scanning an old document that has faded text.

Tap on the Photo icon on the top right of the Google Lens app if you want to copy-paste text from a photo you’ve taken. 

Here’s how to copy-paste text using the Google Lens icon inside the Google Photos app:

1. Open Google Photos.
2. Open the photo you want to copy-paste text from.
3. Tap in the Google Lens icon.

4. Tap on the Search Icon to launch the Google Lens mode options.

5. Tap on the Text icon.

6. Tap on Select All (or you can tap on sections of text you want to select).

7. Tap on Copy Text.

8. Open up the app or document you wish to copy the text into (I use Google Docs on my phone).
9. Long press the cursor in your document to summon the selection menu.

10. Tap Paste.
11. Save document and open up on desktop to make edits to the text (if needed). My example needed editing as I was scanning an old document that has faded text.

Translate Text in Textbooks and on Signs

Google Lens is able to quickly translate foreign words in any image into your own language. Handy for when you are traveling or need to translate text from a textbook.

Here’s a quick video to show how it is done:

Here’s how to translate text using the Google Lens app:

1. Open the Google Lens app (Android only).
2. Point your phone’s camera over all the text you want to translate.

3. Tap on the Translate icon and the translated words will appear over the original words.  Tap on Copy All if you want to copy-paste the translated text into a document.

Here’s how to translate text using the Google Lens icon inside Google Photos app:

1. Open Google Photos.
2. Open the photo you want to translate text from.
3. Tap in the Google Lens icon.

4. Tap on Search icon to access Google Lens modes.

5. Tap on Translate icon.

6. The translated words will appear over the original words.

Scan QR Codes

Google Lens is able to read QR codes so there is no need to install a QR Code Reader.  Thanks to Frank Cademartori for sharing this tip!

In Google Photos you tap on the QR code you want to read once you’ve tapped on the Google Lens icon and the URL from the QR code is displayed below the image.

Inside the Google lens app on an android phone you tap on the QR code to reveal the link and then tap on the link to visit the website.

Any Tips or Questions?

I hope this information helps you get the most out of Google Lens.  I haven’t included instructions for how to use Shopping or Dining mode – refer to the following video to see how these two modes work.

Remember, if you’d like to learn more about Google Photos, check out our complete guide.

Please leave a comment below to provide tips on using Google Lens or let me know if you have any questions.