The blog post about blogging...

T-minus two weeks until the students get here and I've got to tie up loose ends in my syllabus and make official assignment hand outs. Since the first assignment, which is an ongoing assignment, is to start a reflection blog I thought I'd start there. So I opened a Word document and had a staring contest with that blank page for a solid five minutes. It was so...empty.

I have this thing about aesthetics and saw myself spending hours trying to make the page look less like a word document and more like a fun handout or something. And then *ding* the light bulb went off and I thought, why not make a blog post about blogging? The students will have to access my blog thereby giving them a concrete example and the links will be live. Yay!

So eager, young grasshoppers who are definitely reading this entry because it is REQUIRED, why am I asking you to keep a blog? A few reasons:

• Reflective practice is an integral component of your First Year Seminar and will help you grow as a student and professional
• Blogging makes sharing thoughts and ideas easy and will help you become part of a community of learners
• You will become more technologically savvy this way, as opposed to keep handwritten journals (plus I don't have to worry about deciphering messy handwriting)
• Your blog will serve a record of your activities as a first year student and, aside from being interesting reading later, will help you remember events for future school/job/internship/scholarship applications

So on to the nitty-gritty...how do you set up your blog? While there are many blogging platforms available, for the sake of continuity I am going to request that you all use Blogger. Because another blog has already done an excellent job giving instructions for how to get started in Blogger, I'm just going to paste them below, here:

Instructions

This video from Blogger shows you what to do. There are written instructions below, too, if you prefer those.

Click to enlarge

1. Go to http://www.blogger.com.
2. If you already have a Google account and you'd like your blog to be linked to that, then sign in and proceed to step three. Otherwise, click on 'Get started'.
1. Fill in the details on the 'Create an account' page. When you've completed all the details click 'save. You should get a confirmation email to the email address you supplied.
3. You should now be on the Blogger 'dashboard' page. It has two main parts - your profile, and your blogs. Investigate the 'edit profile' option and note that you can change the visibility of your name, email address and any profile picture you upload. You can change these settings at any time.
4. When you've set up your profile as you want, click on 'create your blog now'
5. Fill in the required details on each page. All the options, including blog title, URL and the template design, can be changed later.
6. You should now be given the option to make your first post. Posting is pretty straightforward - note that you have the option to write your post in html, or to use the 'compose' option. 'Compose' is much more straightforward - it's like using a wordprocessor, but if you have html knowledge you might sometimes want to tinker with the html of a post. Options for adding links, images and formatting are available across the top of the editing box.
7. When you've written a post you can preview it, save it for later, and, using the orange button, publish it online.

If you want a little more information, check out this post put out by the Wikiman. While it is geared towards librarians, if you ignore the library-specific stuff there is some great information and links to more information about starting your first blog.

If you have questions please post them in the comment section below and I will address them as soon as possible.

Now what are you waiting for? Go start blogging!