A couple of years ago I had a 180 blog. If you haven’t heard of this, you should check out #Teach180, because it is fascinating! I really enjoyed doing it and was considering doing it again for the upcoming year. But I was unsure, because I get busy and sometimes would forget days. Then I saw this tweet from Sarah, (who actually started this hashtag!):
“I frequently miss a day. NO BIGGIE.” Sarah’s tweet took away the guilt. If I miss a day, or two or three, it is OK! No more teacher guilt. So I have decided that I AM going to do it again this year!
If you are thinking about it, I would say definitely say, “Go for it!”. I made it super low maintenance by creating a new blog (see below for how I did it). Some teachers just tweet a picture or post a picture to Instagram. Some people use IFFF to post to Twitter, but you are also able to just connect the two if you allow Instagram to connect to your Twitter account.
I loved capturing students doing awesome math every day. The students loved being photographed and seeing pictures of themselves. I shared the 180 blog website with my parents at parent night. The pictures I took everyday were a great reminder of things that I wanted to blog about later. I also loved having a visual record of my year. The next year, the blog was a visual reminder of the interesting activities I did not want to forget about (like Kate’s Graphles to Graphles Game).
This is how I ran my 180 blog. But there is no perfect way! Just do it!
- I just took one pic a day, not per class. If I took multiple pictures that day, I would picstitch them together so I could make “one” post. However, this year I am going to be less strict. If I take multiple pics, I will do multiple posts.
- I started a NEW WordPress.com site and picked a free photo theme! That was really fun as the photo themes are so different than my regular blog.
- I downloaded the WordPress app to my phone so it was truly effortless to post each day.
- I added the categories #Teach180, #Alg2Chat, and #MTBoS to the blog settings. So each time I posted to the blog, I could easily click on those catagories.
- I connected the blog to my Twitter account. Last time, I included #Teach180 and #Alg2Chat to the TITLE of each blog post. Each time I published a post, WordPress would tweet out the title, and my desired hashtags were automatically included.
- THIS year, I am using IFTTT (If Then Then That) to automatically tweet every blog post and attach the #Teach180 #Alg2Chat and #MTBoS hashtags. I had to create my own applet. Here is what it looked like when finished.
- You may have to get permission from your school / parents. We have our students sign an extra form each year.
I would LOVE to see your 180 blogs, or any great ideas that you have. So please, post the link to your 180 blog in the comments!
I Speak Math 
Great advice Julie! I (selfishly) love having my archive of photo180 posts, so useful to me. And if a commitment to every day sounds like too much, try every other day. Every day got draining after a couple of years of a photo180 blog (http://photo180.recursiveprocess.com) so I went weekly which wasn’t enough, but for me the “goldilocks” amount was every other day. Could share interesting things, and the commitment was just right.
Yes. I so agree. We have to do what we can. And even if we miss many days, we are still posting some days and benefitting from it!
This is really encouraging! I started reading thinking “I could never do that,” but you’ve got me more than halfway convinced! Thanks especially for the practical how-to advice.
Yeah! It’s so fun, and great to look back on! I’m glad I could help. 🙂
I love this idea. Sounds like something I can manage. A way to blog with pictures. I might just take a leap of faith and try it.
Awesome! If you are unsure, you could start it without telling your students and parents to see if you enjoy it and can handle it. That way if you don’t like it, no one is the wiser! 🙂
I’m trying this out and followed your instructions. I got stuck at this part: then added #Teach180, #Alg2Chat, and #MTBoS to the blog settings. So each time I posted to the blog, it would automatically tweet the post out with those hashtags.
How do I add the hashtags to the blog settings? Thank you!
Hi! And thank you for helping me realize that I misspoke! I actually typed the hashtags into the Title of each post so that it would be included when tweeted. I’m so sorry and have edited my post. I did add categories so I could just click on that when posting and made my default category Algebra 2 instead of uncategorized. There may be a way to do that, but I don’t know it yet! If you find out, I’d love to know! 🙂
Just remembered that you can use https://ifttt.com/ to auto tweet your post with hashtags. 🙂
I totally forgot about that site. Thank you!
Like how you set up your blog. I just started my blog 180 or #teach180. http://Www.knighttimemath.com going to change some of my auto posting setting right now.
You can also use https://ifttt.com/ to auto tweet your blog post with any hashtags you would like!