Setting up your blog

Follow these instructions to set up your edublogs blog, just looking at the “Student Instruction Guide,” which starts about six lines down on the page. If you’re concerned about privacy, be sure not to use your name in your blog’s URL; you may also want to use a nickname or pseudonym for a screen name. Once you’ve set up your blog, go to the blog dashboard and then My Class > Join a Class to get started. The domain of the class blog is “bccenglish11” (just what’s inside the quotation marks). Also please  email me its URL from the email account that you plan to use for the course, which should be one that you will be checking regularly.

Here’s a video that goes over most of the info above, in addition to showing the difference between classic and block editors (as I briefly touched on in class on Monday):

Don’t worry too much about the initial set-up of the blog. You can change most of the settings, like name of blog, later. As you see other people’s blogs, you may be inspired to do some personalizing, changing colors or themes. You may do as much or as little of this as you like–just please make sure your blog is legible (no dark letters on dark backgrounds, for example).

NOTE. I just started asking students to do the “Join a class” thing a few semesters ago. I did it because the previous semester some students had problems getting locked out of their blogs, and edublogs folks said that wouldn’t happen if I set up a class and had students join. There are a few other advantages:

  • Once I accept you into the class, you’ll see a link to the Class blog on the left side of your Dashboard near the top, which can be handy if you want to toggle back and forth from your blog to the course blog. If you end up in a Dashboard that has just a few options on the left, that’s the dashboard of the course blog–I’ll do a video to demonstrate in a bit.
  • The other advantage to joining a class is that you have a much wider range of choices for your blog’s appearance (see link below to instructions for changing theme of blog).
  • The other thing that I’m not too crazy about is that if students join the class, then I can access the inside of your blog. That feels a little Big-Brother-like to me, but it has come in handy if I need to help a student adjust a setting or something. I promise not to mess with things on your blog…unless I’m asked! 🙂

ALSO NOTE: You will not be able to add your name to the list of student blogs on the course blog; I’m the only one who can do that, which is why I asked you to email me your blog URL’s. (You can add links to the sidebar of your own blog if you’d like–I’ll show later if anyone’s interested, or you can search the Help info.)

This link gives info about how to change the look of your blog.

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