EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
Not sure how to create a blog (or not even sure what a blog is)? If you're a novice to the world of blogs, this article provides basic information about blogs and shows how getting started is easy, fun, (and free)!
Simply put, blogs are basic web pages that are easy to create, and don't require the purchase of any special software. There are, perhaps, millions of blogs that serve as personal journals, such as LiveJournal (which hosts tales of teenage woe and heartache), Darth Vader's blog, The Misadventures of Napoleon Girland Maiko Covington's multilingual blo. Although personal blogs are fun to read and write, blogs don't have to be informal. Blogs can be highly focused, specialized, scholarly, and influential, such as Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit, or Lanny Arvan's blog (University of Illinois Assistant CIO), which is devoted specifically to educational technology issues.
Google's Blogger software is a good place to get started creating your first blog. If you are new to Blogger you need to sign up first. All this requires is a user name (not a real name, but a variation or something else that is unique and has no spaces, such as "elvisrocks38"), a password (just pick something simple you won't forget), and an email address. Next, give your blog a name (this has to be unique because this will be the web address of your blog. Blogger adds your unique blog name between the start of the web address "http://" and the end of the web address "blogspot.com."), a title (anything you want), and choose a template (pick the look and colors you like).
Blogger's Add Image Window
Blogger's Insert Link Window
Once you have set up your Blogger account, you can post your first message. Use the tabs and sub tabs at the top of the page to work in Blogger. Click "Posting" and then "Create" to open up a simple window where you can begin typing your post. Every blog post has a title and then a text body. Just start with something simple and use the big, orange "Publish Post" button to publish your post. To edit or delete an old post, use the "Edit Posts" sub tab under Post. You'll eventually explore all of the tabs and sub tabs, but the main tab for working is "Posting." Along with creating a simple text posting, you can create links to other web sites via the Insert Link icon, or you can add images to your blog via the Add Image icon .
With your Blogger account you can actually create multiple blogs. For example, you might want your own general blog, but you also want a separate blog to highlight your upcoming trip to Costa Rica. In your Blogger "dashboard" you can create and edit multiple blogs within your account. Blogger provides hundreds of megs of space, so you can have dozens of blogs with countless images and you won't run out of space.
There is no longer any doubt that blogs, like email and word processing before them, are new technologies that are here to stay. What is not yet clear is how teachers and students will ultimately choose to use these emerging technologies. What is clear, however, is that teachers will be able to make better decisions about how they use blogs in the classroom if they have first tested out and experimented with these emerging technologies.
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