Does your site include information for current or prospective students?  If so, check out the new team of student bloggers.

We launched student blogs in January 2009 for prospective students to find out more about what Imperial student life is really like. The blogs quickly picked up a good following, with prospective students commenting and asking questions.  Since the launch, they have won a UCDA design award and eduStyle awards for most innovative website and best institution sponsored blog.

Following on from the success of last year’s student blogs, we’ve selected a second cohort of bloggers. Three members of the first blogging team have stayed on and are joined by seven new bloggers recruited at the beginning of this academic term.

We need your help!

We want to make sure prospective students find the blogs, so to help promote them, we’ve created a web advert for you.  You can see the advert on the Web Guide homepage.  If you manage web pages for prospective or current students, you can easily add this advert to the right hand grey navigation bar on your homepage or particular pages.

In order to place the advert on your site, follow these steps:

• Right click on this link – and select “save target as” or “save link as”. Save this to your desktop.
• Right click on the file on your desktop, and select “Open with” – choose “notepad” or “simple text” (or any simple plain text editor.) When you open this file, it should display a short piece of code.
• Copy and paste the full piece of code into the HTML view of a content area in your grey navigation bar.
• If you’re not sure how to add content to the right hand grey navigation bar on your site, please visit the Web Guide FAQs.  If you need any help, please contact the Service Desk or comment on this post.
• It would be really helpful if you could comment on this blog post with the URLs of any pages where you add the blogging advert.

More about the student blogs

The opportunity to become an official Imperial student blogger was promoted throughout Freshers’ Week through adverts on Facebook and the College and Union sites, posters, flyers and word of mouth.  Students keen to join the team were asked to write 600 words about their life as a student, with entries judged by a panel from Imperial College Union and Communications Division.  The panel were keen to ensure a good cross section of disciplines, nationalities and years amongst the bloggers, as well as having a team of engaging and enthusiastic bloggers – and judging by their first few posts, we’ve got a great team!

Our bloggers aim to blog at least once a week on their life as a student at Imperial, and are encouraged to include photos and videos in their blogs.  They aren’t paid, but receive incentives and prizes during their time on the team.  All bloggers receive a digital camera and other goodies when they join, and each month our “blogger awards” recognise those who blog most regularly, who receive the most comments and who try unusual approaches to reporting.  In order to ensure an authentic student voice, we monitor but don’t pre-moderate the blogs and the bloggers themselves review and approve comments.

We hope that you enjoy reading and commenting on the student blogs.  Let us know what you think!