Blogs

=Lesson 3: Part 1=

Tooting Your Horn in the 21st Century With...
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A computer with internet access. That's it!
 * Equipment Needed for this assignment:**

So just what is a "blog," anyway? The term comes from the combination of the word "web" with the word "log," as in journal or chronicle. Simply put, then, a blog is a personal website that is updated regularly in periodical fashion with "posts" of new ideas or information, typically organized in reverse-chronological order and allowing blog visitors to add public "comments" to each "post."
 * Step 1: What is a blog?**

Here is a short video that explains the basic concept quite nicely: media type="youtube" key="NN2I1pWXjXI&hl=en" height="355" width="425"

Bloggers create and use these blogs for a wide variety of purposes--a blog can serve as a personal soapbox, a method for communicating important news, a place to share and discuss ideas, an online gathering place for people who share a common interest. . . the possibilities are as varied as the bloggers who use them.

Thanks to blog-hosting web services, blogs are incredibly simple to create and easy to use. They are excellent tools for online publishing, networking, and dialogue--no longer do you need to know how to program in HTML code to create and maintain a dynamic personal website. While blogs can include pictures and imbedded video, they primarily provide a fun and user-friendly online space for writing and thinking. As such, their public, interactive nature creates a powerful sense of audience and encourages collaboration. Imagine a group of students in a classroom using writing to think about a particular prompt or subject, then reading their responses, then writing anew to reflect on their classmates' thoughts. Blogs provide a framework for just this sort of writing and thinking in a way that can carry the conversation well beyond the confines of the classroom.
 * Step 2: Why blogs in education?**

To get a sense of the possibilities that blogs offer, take a few moments to look at several blogs centered in one way or another on the world of teaching and learning:
 * Step 3: BlogTour**
 * High School Spanish students create blogs dedicated to topics they are interested in (list on the right): []
 * A WWI soldier's personal experience of war as related through letters he wrote home and subsequently added to a blog exactly 90 years after they were mailed: []
 * A blog used to share class assignments and messages to students in a High School Social Studies class: []
 * A blog dedicated to sharing art resources for students, teachers and artists alike: []
 * An elementary history teacher's blog dedicated to historical research and teaching: []
 * This site contains an array of blogs by and for educators: []

Educators interested in blogging can choose between many different blog hosting sites on the web, some of the most prominent being [|blogger.com], [|wordpress.com], and [|edublogs.org]. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will use Blogger to walk you through the process of creating your own blog, as it offers perhaps the easiest and most flexible interface available. Moreover, once you learn one platform, it's pretty easy to move to another.
 * Step 4: Follow the steps below to create your own Blog.**

If you are new to blogging, start with something simple. Don't feel like you have to come up with a brilliant educational application; do something personal, instead, like chronicling the growth of a new baby (your mother-in-law will love you for it), or journaling about your summer travels, or just transfering your regular writing-and-thinking habit to a new medium. You'll be surprised how easy and rewarding it can be. Ready to get started? Just follow these easy steps:
 * 1) Open a new window so you can switch between this page of instructions and the Blogger site.
 * 2) Go to the Blogger [|start page] and click the orange "Create A Blog" box.
 * 3) If you do not have a Google account, create one in the box provided.
 * 4) Fill in the blanks with your email address and your choice of password and display name, fill in the word verification information, check the terms of service box, and hit "continue." Note that blogger.com is a Google property; if you already have a Google log-in, you won't need a new user name and password and can skip this step.
 * 5) Type in the name you want for your blog (what you want the big title at the top of your blog to read) and then fill in the blank to complete your blog's URL (the location one would type into a web browser to access your blog). Make sure you click on "Check Availability" before proceeding; if you get an error message, you'll need to try a different URL. [[image:url_availability.jpg align="center"]]
 * 6) Choose a template, a basic look for your blog. You can preview any of the basic choices (and read a little //Paradise Lost// while you're at it), but don't agonize over this choice, as it is exceptionally easy to change your blog's look later. Click "Continue,"and you are ready to . ..

The following video provides wonderful explantions concerning how to edit, post and generally use Blogger. A number of steps are also explained below the videos. media type="google" key="-6477846893924984833&hl=en&fs=true" width="400" height="326"
 * Step 5: The blog in action**

The first screen that appears when you click the **Start Blogging** button is a **Create Post** page. This is the page you will use every time you want to make a new post to your blog. Posting is as easy as writing an email. . . you fill in the title (subject) line, type your thoughts (message) into the text box, and hit **Publish Post** (send) down in the lower left corner. But before you do, we should call your attention to two important **Posting** details. First, notice the **Labels** box at the bottom right of the screenshot below. Adding labels to your posts helps both you and your readers find your way around as the posts add up and begin to be archived. At a click, labels allow you and your readers to browse all prior posts on a particular topic.

Second, you should learn how to imbed a hyperlink within the text of a blog post. Doing so is as easy as highlighting the text that you want to serve as a link to another web page, clicking on the link symbol in the editing bar (it shows the Earth with chain links in front of it), and then pasting the external site's URL into the box that opens up. The process is easy, and hyperlinks can add a lot of richness to your readers' experience.

Okay, now you can hit **Publish** Post and view your blog page and see your handiwork. Pretty cool, huh? One other thing: notice the **0 comments** label in the screen shot below. Anybody who visits your blog (including you) can click on that message to open up a comment window and respond to your post, and the label will change to reflect how many responses you have received.



In a nutshell, these are the basic steps to creating a blog, all that you need to begin writing and publishing online. Now that you see how easy it is, you'll no doubt have some good ideas about what you might do with this capability, and you'll want to further learn your way around your blog's architecture.


 * Step 6: Getting in deeper and finding your way around

 **Notice the Blogger toolbar at the top of your blog page. On the upper right, you have buttons for making a new post and for signing out of Blogger as well as a button labeled **Customize**. Clicking on **Customize** gets you to a series of menus that you can easily choose between by clicking on their tabs.

From the Posting tab, clicking on **Create** prompts you to make a new post, while **Edit Posts** is the button to click if you wish to edit or even delete an existing post. Comment moderation is enabled elsewhere, so for now you can ignore the **Moderate Comments** button.

The **Settings** tab opens up a number of important options, and you'll want to do a little exploring here. Blogger does a pretty good job of explaining the different options, but we'll highlight a couple of particularly important ones that have particular bearing on how you might use a blog in an educational setting.

Clicking on the **Permissions** button gives you, among other things, the option to **Add Authors** to your blog. Currently, you are the sole author of your blog, the only person with posting privileges. Others may be able to read and comment (depending on other settings), but they may not initiate new posts. If you are setting up a shared cassroom blog, however, you may want to allow your students the ability to post new topics, not just comment on them. To add authors, click on the **add** button and type in the email addresses of those you wish to invite. Note that any new authors will need their own blogger.com/Google accounts.

The **Permissions** button also allows you to restrict readership of your blog. On its default setting, your blog can be read by anyone in the world who can find it on the web, but you may restrict readership to invited guests only. You may have good reasons for wanting to restrict your audience, but keep in mind that doing so makes your blog less user-friendly, as invited readers will have to log-in every time they want to visit.

While still browsing around under the **Settings** tab, give the **Comments** button a click. In the same way that you can restrict outside readers, you can restrict the ability of readers to comment on blog posts. Alternately, you can enable comment moderation, giving you the power to approve or deny any comment before it reaches the reading public. Working with young people in this medium, you may want this extra degree of control.

Under the **Layout** tab, the **Page Elements** button is the most fun and the most important button to become familiar with. Play around with dragging page elements to new positions, and see what options you have when you click to edit these elements. In particular, explore the different options given when you click **Add a Page Element**; you'll find **Link List** particularly useful for adding links to other resources and other blogs in your blog's sidebar.

Lesson 3: Tooting Your Own Horn