What did my Class Blog Teach Me After a Year?

* You don't need a huge amount of resources either class wide, syndicate wide, or school wide to run a successful blog. We had two video cameras in the entire school. One broke at one point, and that left us with one, but will still kept going. One classroom computer was a stretch but you get around that by doing things like printing out comments, feedjit links and sharing that with the students "old school".
* Once you discover a 'niche' things will take off. Ours was using the culture of the students to share with the world. Once people starting locating our site due to the cultural work of the students (Learn to Speak Samoan et al) it became a successful cycle. I remain convinced there's a huge auidence out there for whatever your students can produce - that depends on the culture of students that you have in the classroom and your location, New Zealand is a place that some people have never, ever heard of. Its a wonderful buzz for students to get a comment from overseas for us and the reverse is true for us. We used clustermaps and feedjit to highlight everytime we got a hit from an interesting place, and even more so when we got a wonderful comment that we could share.
* Video is better [than written]. Writing plays a huge, huge part in your site but I think video is better for presenting the final produce. Point England School in Auckland have some wonderful examples of students reading their Literacy, obviously you can Podcast but nothing captures the sense of students than having them on screen. There are so many wonderful examples of this around the world. If you haven't already visited them, then have a look at Mrs Yollis Class in the USA or Mr Sloans Class in the UK. I'd argue that eventually when you get 'running' with your video work its easier than producing detailed written work, as an auidence I know what students want to see.
* They will come. My old site managed 4,000 visitors in 12 months. I was pleased with this, but in the year since its stopped posting (2009) we had 8,000 further visitors! Also the 2009 site managed to get 7,000 in its first year. I'd imagine that most people would have similar experiences. I know of four or five year old sites hitting 40,000 visits.