About Blogs

Well, you've made it so far! Blogs can be very useful for teachers and pupils because you have a channel of communication you can use for each other - and for the parents.

When you set a blog up you can also choose to make it entirely open and accessible (like this one) or more or less hide it altogether, so that only the people you've invited to read it can even find it. It'd be a bit of a pain at the start of the term, but let's say you've got 20 pupils in your class, each of whom has a school e-mail address and each of whose parents have one mail address between them.

That'd involve you in sending a list of 20 addresses to Blogger to be listed as authors and another 20 addresses to be listed as readers. Once you've got the list, it takes no more than a couple of seconds (it's getting the accurate list which takes time). Then you'd have a blog which the pupils can write in and their parents can read which is only accessible to them (and you).

If you wanted to create another blog for the general public, it'd also be possible, perhaps with just you as the author. Let's say you wanted to circulate a particularly good post from the private blog. You just click on the Dashboard link (the B in an orange box), click on View Posts and Edit Post, copy everything from the private post … and go over to the public blog, create a new post and paste the private post into it.

If your school uses a course management system (like Moodle or Blackboard), there'll be a blog function in that. The only problem is that the parents might not have access to it … and it'll be an even bigger pain negotiating with your IT Department to give them access. The parents would probably have to use a different e-mail address than their ordinary one to log on to it too.

The Blog Task

Welcome to Beths group. 1. The Blog Post - this is what you have to do:

Describe an ICT resource which is available to you, as a teacher, or to your pupils, paying particular attention to how it works and how it can be used. Looking forward to your contributions. Beth

How to make a post on the course blog

This is how to make a post on the course blog:

1. You need to make sure that you've logged on to Blogger as the person who has the permission to make posts (i.e. using the ID you used when you accepted the invitation to become an author).

2. Then when you access the blog, you'll see a link (in small, light-blue letters) at the top of the page called 'New Post'. Click on that link and you'll see a text box that looks like this:

I'm in the 'Compose' function right now, but if you wanted to do fancy things with html, you'd click on the 'Edit HTML' tab instead. 'Compose' works fine for most of the things you might want to do.

3. You can either write directly into the text box, or copy and paste your text from, say, a Word document.

The tools in the bar at the top of the text box are fairly standard - you use them to change the formatting of your text after it's in the text box.

4. Blogger saves your draft text automatically at fairly short intervals (the Save Now button goes dark when everything's been saved). When you're ready, though, you could click on the Preview button for a last check on what it looks like … and then you click Publish Post when you're ready.

5. If you notice something you want to change even after you've posted your Blog Post, you've always got the 'Edit Posts' option at the top of the page, or, if you click on the little pen at the bottom of your post in the blog, you come straight back to this Edit page.

Don't forget to add your name to your Blog Post!