ICT Inspirations

ICT Subject Leaders Blogging Workshop March 2007

I Blog, You Blog, We Blog Together: 

What is a Blog?

Blog is short for Weblog. Apparently becoming colloquially known as a blog didn't take long, and originated from a realisation that the term weblog could be split into two derivatives, and the idea that if I weblog, and you weblog, that means "We Blog" (Tee Hee), needless to say the term has stuck ever since.  People among the "We Blog," group are known as "Bloggers."

People use blogs for many different things, so to say what a blog is would be virtually impossible as people use them for different purposes.  I use mine to reflect upon practice, share ideas, and as a sounding board.  To some it is a journal or diary, For Keith a place to share the practice he observes, resources he finds, an iterative newsletter, and a single point of contact among other things.

Recommended as a Blogging platform at our session at The I, was the "ethink" Platform, to be found at www.ethink.org.uk.

Creating a Blog  Space

This is fairly straight forward.  You need

• An idea about what you would like your blog to be called.  This will become your login. if for your school you could start with yourschoolname  so your final blog's url will be yourschoolname.ethink.org.uk
• An Email Address:  This is where ethink will send your blog details including your log in, your url and a password which they will provide.  A mix of letters and numbers for security reasons.
• A Title for your Blog, this will describe the character of your pages and what they are about.

These are fairly generic needs, and even if creating a personal blog with for example Google through Blogger www.blogger.com, you will need to think about these things before starting.

 Writing and posting an entry at ethink.

Ethink uses a platform called Wordpress to author and manage Blog Entries you make.

After you log in you will find yourself at the dashboard, your starting point in any blogging platform, as from here you can access all the tools you have available. 

In Ethink and Wordpress, this has a navigation bar at the top, with initially dashboard highlighted.  Click Write, and then Write Post, Click in the Title Box and give your "post" a  title, click in the post box, and begin to express yourself.

You can use the tools on the tool bar, to do pretty much all the basic things you do in a word processor, maybe the best way to view this "authoring tool" is as a cross between a desk top publisher or word processor and an email client.  You can upload pictures to the space, add hyperlinks, centre, left and right align text and so on. 

You can also "split" your post, this means you insert a break to the post, and only the text before the split is visible on the blog page.  Inorder to read the rest, your visitor must, click a hyperlink, inserted automatically by Wordpress.  Perhaps you could put the split after a taster paragraph, or after a cliffhanger, to encourage readers to read on...

Anyway, with your post you can

• Save and continue editing
• You can Save this stores the draft, for review until you are happy
• You can Publish, and make your thoughts visible to the wider world.

A Wilbur Helps Out Comic strip is also now also available for download from my website.

Some things to consider

E Safety

On my Blog I am concerned that unwanted, unsolicited and unreviewed comments do not appear on my pages, I am sure you would probably like this too. 

On First using your blog space, click the Options link, and then discussions link to check that the following are ticked

	Click on Thumbnail to see settings

Use your class Blog, as a whole class space. 

• Do give students the opportunity to write to the space, perhaps as a small group activity.
• Do not allow the students to have password access, which will allow them to log onto the blog themselves.
• Do review and monitor content before publishing.
• Do use your class Blog Space as part of whole class teaching, perhaps through shared writing activities, as a celebration space to upload together exciting work from the week, as a class newsletter, as a place to direct parents and students to see what has been going on, or to share online resources you and the children have enjoyed. 
• Not All blog entries need be authoured online, they could written offline initially in a wordprocessing package, and the content copied and pasted from here to the post later.  Use "Control V", to paste content to the post pages.
• Images, beware of posting full face images, if the text refers to students by name.  Try to post group photos where possible, part face images or photographs of children taken from angles which obscure identification.  Be Aware of your School's Policy on Digital Permissions.
• Do Share ideas use your blog, and send references to your work to Keith or myself and we will redirect these, or include them in our own blogs

For some supporting ideas about E Safety issues, I have developed some ideas on my school website at www.teyfant.bristol.sch.uk, there are also a few useful links, and downloads listed here, as well as some activities and resources I used with the students in our resource bank section. 

Look forward to reading your blogging adventures.  Hopefully more folk will soon join us on the blogging adventure.

Simon Mills

ict.teyfant.p@bristol.gov.uk