A blog. What is that anyway?
A blog is a type of website. Well, kind of. While that statement is true, a blog is something much more personal and user-generated. Blogs (previously called “web logs”) are used by a wide variety of users for an even larger variety of purposes. The “blogosphere” (online blog world) has more than 50 million bloggers (or more, some estimate up to 100 million bloggers) from every continent/country. These users are “blogging” (yes, it’s a verb too) about any and every topic that they find engaging or of interest. There are as many types of blogs are there are bloggers.
The purpose of a blog is to communicate – and react! – with an audience. A blog begins a dialogue about a topic or shares information that connects individuals, etc. It develops a community via the comments left and the responses to them.
Blogs are updated frequently. Much more so than a typical “website”. (Keep in mind, however, that a website can also have a blog on it or a blog can comprise an entire “site” by itself.)
Here are a few links to help you understand the idea of blogs:
- What is a blog? or this one too.
- Why blog? (For teachers)
- Why blog? (For administrators.) -NOTE…this is a PDF document.
- Ten Tips for Blogger: Be an effective blogger
- How to be an awesome blogger (Tips from Cool Cat Teacher Blog)
Now, time to ACT! Follow these steps to get yourself into the blogosphere and participate! Remember that exploring and practicing new tools are how to build familiarity and expertise.
- Watch this video about setting up a wordpress.com blog. (The video lasts about 7 minutes.)
- Start your own blog. (We recommend using wordpress.com or edublogs.org . All of the tutorials here will address the wordpress format (which is also on edublogs.org).
- Start by making an account at wordpress. Use an email address, username, and password that you will remember.
- Start your blog. Choose a blog name and URL. The URL that you choose is PERMANENT. It will show up in the address bar of your browser and it is what you will use to access your blog. For example, if you choose the URL “pink pandas”, you would type in “pinkpandas.wordpress.com” to get to your blog.
- Select your template.
- Play around and add a few categories, posts, pages, etc. No worries – all of these can be deleted when/if you would like.
- Create an “About” page to tell us about you and your blog.
- Create a “Post” to tell us about your newfound blogging knowledge and the ideas you are percolating about how this blog can be used with your classes or in your professional development, etc. (NOTE: In the future, you will be creating posts in response to the different ideas we test out and learn together. Please be sure to label these posts with the STEP #: Title, like: “STEP ONE: Blogging” etc.)
- Post a LINK in a COMMENT to this POST/PAGE to your blog and post about blogging. We will create a “blogroll” or list of blogs that everyone has created here for us to build our community.
Be sure to check in on your blog and play around with the different menu options. Blogs are like pets, without food, exercise, practice and new tricks, they’ll die. This is probably true for us teachers too. Don’t you think
If you have an idea for a topic or tech-integrated teaching idea that you would like to pursue as part of this Professional Learning Community, PLEASE let us know! You can email, post a comment, etc.
