The Blogging Cookbook for College ESL Teachers

Download your copy of The Blogging Cookbook for College ESL Teachers by Nicholas Walker and Helen Hefter.

Learn HTML while Blogging

The Blogging Cookbook for College ESL Teachers is intended to be self-explanatory. By following the directions, you will be able to create a web-log website (blog) that could prove useful and profitable to you. The examples are all relevant to ESL/EFL and will generate traffic, which will attract readers, advertisers and revenue to your blog. The principle goal of this cookbook, however, is to provide you with the confidence and momentum you’ll need to continue blogging and learning HTML, a basic web-programming language used extensively on the internet.

In this book, you will find the steps to follow to produce a 13-post blog of your own. The first three sections will simply introduce you to a free blogging platform called Blogger.com. Blogger is a Google property. It is free and easy to use. After a year of blogging, Blogger will offer to integrate AdSense advertisements into your blog, which will allow you to start making money from ads. (Remember that ads pay for content, so if you see an ad that interests you on someone else’s blog, click it. It will send the blog writer a small commission.) College students are usually chronically hard-up, so the fact that blogs can generate income is something worth mentioning to students. The next section is merely an illustration of the common HTML tags. The remaining sections will provide you with a number of adaptable mini-projects to include in your blog. Finally, the last section lists some resources that will help you learn more about HTML and blogging with students. 

All of the mini-projects in this cookbook use HTML rather than the what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) compose-mode of Blogger. The reason for this choice is to provide you with HTML resources that you can use elsewhere, like Wordpress, Moodle, email, or any website that allows you to use HTML code. Also, I have found that simply by looking at HTML code you can learn a fair bit of HTML programming without having to take a course or rely on programmers. Basic HTML is pretty obvious: <b> means bold, <i> means italics, <strike> means strikethrough, <br> means break, etc. Take the time to look at the tags. You will get the hang of it very quickly.

Yours to Share and Adapt in Accordance with Sharealike 2.5

Remember that you are free to share the code, text, and images in this Blogging Cookbook for College ESL Teachers with your students and colleagues. You are also free to reuse and adapt any part of this document provided that you credit us, the original authors, Nicholas Walker and Helen Hefter. We also ask (but cannot insist) that you retain the links in the various mini-projects to our websites: VirtualWritingTutor.com, FieldRelated.com, BokomaruPublications.com, and Actively-Engaged-Online.blogspot.com. These links send a weak signal to Google and Bing to rank our websites a little higher in their search results. That helps us get our message out about our projects.

You can add your name as co-author to your adapted or expanded version of this document and even charge money for it, but you must retain the Sharealike 2.5 license on derivations. For example, you may want to add instructions for creating an account on Wordpress.com or Tumblr.com. Please do. Just add your name under our names on the first page. Remember that you can change the cookbook and pass it on, but you cannot prevent others from further adapting and expanding this document, too. Sound fair?

In any case, we hope you find The Blogging Cookbook for College ESL Teachers useful to you and your students.

Nicholas Walker and Helen Hefter
August 15, 2016