The World Is Our Audience

But We Still Need To Know Our Target Audience

Though blogs are in the public domain, blogs and bloggers write about topics to catch the interest of a target audience. As teachers, we try and reinforce this concept to students. When working on writing tasks, we teach students to think of the audience and consider how the audience will affect the style of writing; how much information should be shared; what type of vocabulary should be used with the audience; length of piece;  the purpose of the piece and the age/background of the audience.   Keeping this in mind, it is easy to see why it is important to have a separate class blog and a professional blog.  Each one of these blogs targets a very different audience and the purpose of each is also different.  

A professional blog for teachers is about pedagogy, practice and reflections.  The blog looks at what is being done in the classroom and comments on experiences.  It is open for others in similar situations to share their learning or practice.  It is a place for teachers to connect and collaborate.  Through the professional blog, as new ideas and thoughts are added the teacher of the professional blog gains new insight to ideas which allows for personal growth. 

The classroom blog is for students to grow.  It is a place for them to share their learning with peers.  It allows peers to comment and add ideas to what is being discussed.  In this case, the purpose of the teacher is to coach students through blogging.  To model and guide students so that they can grow as the year progresses.  If the student's and professional blogs were to be mixed it may become intimidating for some students to know that their work is being viewed by many teachers.  

FiberOne

Trix

When considering how the formatting would change on each reminded me of the lesson about cereal boxes and targeted audiences.  How we set up the format really depends on our audience.  If we want the targeted audience, students or professionals, to have interactions with either group the blog needs to offer topics that are of interest to that group, and it needs to appeal to visually to the target group.  It is important to keep student blogs and professional blogs separate because as they say, "Trix are for kids!"