Getting Your Blog Student Ready – Blog Training #2

Going Live

The first step to creating a classroom blog is making sure it is an authentic educational experience for the kids. It has got to be more than a novelty, or the kids won’t use it.

Once you have an idea about how you want to use a blog in your classroom, you are ready to make your blog ‘live’. Follow this module to get your blog student ready:

Step One: Cleaning up your blog

Choosing your design – Design>Theme; click on the theme to choose it. Some have customizeable features, others don’t. Find one that works for you.

The sidebar widgets – Design>Widgets; if you don’t add any widgets to the sidebar(s), the default widgets will be shown. Click the add link by the widget you want, Save, click the Edit link on the widget to make changes, Save. If you want text on your sidebar, add the text widget (just make sure you Save before you click Edit); if you find code online for a widget, you would paste it here.

Your Settings – Click the settings link in the upper right corner of the window. Go through the settings and adjust any information needed. One place to make sure you go is Discussion. Determine how you want to be noitified of new comments, and what information you want from the kids. Here is a sample of what most teachers are choosing…don’t forget to scroll down and save after you do this.

Deleting the default post “hello world” – Manage>Posts; click the checkbox and then the Delete button.

Your About page – Manage>Pages. Click on the page title (about). Edit the body of the page to include any information you would like to share. Click the Save button (on the right side of the window)

Add a “Blogging Rules” page – Write>Page. Create an appropriate title, include your rules in the body area. Click Save if you are not ready for the rules to show on your blog; click Publish when the page is ready to post. Here is my page with some sample blogging rules.

Step Two: Creating your first post

From the main dashboard, click on the CREATE A POST link or on the menu bar, choose WRITE>POST.

Enter your title, this will show up larger and bold.

Enter the body of your post. You will see some formatting buttons. To see more, click the last button (show/hide kitchen sink).  Format your text as you wish.

Post Options:

Tags: Tags are keywords within your post. For example, for this post I may tag: blog, widget, format, post, manage. What happens is that if I tag each post with keywords, I could add the Tag widget and all tags would appear in the sidebar (aka: tag cloud). Then you could click on the word format and all posts with a tag of format would show up.

Categories: You can categorize your entire post using this tool. It is just another filtering tool like the tags.

**If you had to choose between Tags and Categories to start…choose categories. Tags can be a little overwhelming, and categories seem to be a good first step.

Advanced Features

For beginners, the most important of the advanced features are the Comments & Pings and the password protection. If you want comments turned off or want to password protect a post, use this area.

Finishing

Click Publish when your post is ready. If you are not ready for the post to be available, you have two options, you can just click Save. Then you would go to Manage>Posts, choose the post and then click Publish. Or you can determine when the post will publish. Above the Save/Publish buttons you will see an Edit link at the end of a statement about when the post will be published. You can set the date and time the post will publish here.

Done with all of this already?

Find a widget online to add to your sidebar or a post. Examples would be a clustrmap, poll/survey, voki, etc…do a google search for widget and see what you get. When adding the code to a post, you must click on the HTML tab (in the upper right side of the body area, you will see Visual and HTML) and paste the code here. If you are adding the widget to your sidebar, see the sidebar widget instructions at the beginning of this post.

Add a picture to a post. Download the picture to your documents. Create a post, and click the add an image button to the left of add media. Upload your picture. Once the picture is uploaded, a windwo will pop up with info about your picture, if you scroll to the bottom, you will see a button to add the picture to your post. Move the picture to the desired area. If you upload a few pictures, you can see them by going to add picutre, then the gallery; click the Show link.

Add a video to your post. You can follow the same instructions as adding a picture. Or if you have the html address of the video (from teachertube.com, edublogs.tv, etc), you can enter it in the window that comes up when you  click add video (to the right of Add media).