During our last TLLP meeting Nicole King shared her new learning about how she is using tags to filter student posts in the Reader. If you haven’t used the Reader tool in the blog dashboard before, the Reader is the fastest way for teachers and students to quickly read posts and leave comments across a class of students’ blogs. Information about how to use the Reader can be found here.
Tags and Categories:
Tags and categories on posts are used to help readers locate information in different ways.
Categories are like chapters of a book; they provide a general overview of the topics you blog about. Whereas tags are more like the index at the back of the book and explode the topic into a million bits.
When your readers click on a categories or tag link on a post or in your sidebar widget area, it loads a page with all posts that use that tag or category. On a post you can add as many categories and tags as you need to make the post easier to locate.
Using Tags to Filter Student Posts in the Reader:
1. The first step is to have all students add the same tag to a post they are writing. For example, if your students are learning about 2D Shapes, as a class you would create a tag that identifies the post (ie./ 2Dshapes2016). All students would then need to add that tag to their posts in the Tags box.
2. Once the students’ posts have been published, instead of visiting each blog separately, the teacher logs into the Class Blog > Dashboard > Reader
3. Once in the Reader, the teacher would then type the tag in the Search… bar. Next, check the box beside Tag and click Search.
4. Posts that contain the tag you searched will then appear in the Reader.
Using tags to filer posts in the Reader makes locating and reading posts much more efficient. It may be helpful to keep a list of tags you create as a class in a Google Doc for future reference.
If you have any questions, or would like to share more ideas about how you are using tags in your classroom, please leave a comment below!
Happy Blogging 😀
Leigh Cassell Consulting 