A couple of years ago, Peter and I waited in line at the King of Prussia Mall to get free stuff from Blogger. They were sponsoring some sort of an event (it might have been a blogger meet up?), and we eagerly made the nearly one hour drive in hopes of getting some swag (aka ‘free stuff’). After waiting for about an hour, we got some stickers and a sweatshirt. I remember happily sporting that sweatshirt as we drove around Delaware. It was much too big for me, navy blue, and had the orange Blogger logo. It read –
I’m blogging this.
I remember getting some funny looks from people, who were most likely wondering what the heck blogging was, but I thought I was so cool. In reality, I was such a poser. Peter was the regular blogger of the two of us – I would post a couple of days in a row and neglect my blog(s) for months or sometimes years. But that’s ok, I rocked my sweatshirt anyway.
A little later, back in the fall of 2006, I started using blogs with my students. In those days I taught Business Education instead of Web Design and Marketing and this consisted of Computer Applications, Accounting, and a little Finance. We used Edublogs. I wouldn’t consider this a very successful use of blogging as we only used our classroom blogs a couple of times.
Friday morning, as I was driving into work, I passed the commute by listening to Gary Vaynerchuk’s book Crush It! There are so many ideas in this book that I’m excited about – I’m definitely going to do a review post later on – but more importantly – perhaps most importantly – was that it got me fired up to try something new with my students that day.
I originally intended to spend part of the morning reviewing our current Web Development chapter on the design concepts with my tenth graders. There are lots of ways to review and some work better than others, but I decided to scrap my original plan and go with something different that I thought (hoped) my students would love: Blogging.
This time, instead of using Edublogs, I decided to use the blogging tool that is available in Blackboard now that we are using Blackboard Learn 9. I should mention, however, that I was incredibly impressed with Edublogs’ customer service back when I used it. After sending an e-mail requesting customer support on some minor issue, James Farmer, who happens to be the Founder and CEO wrote me back and answered my question right away! I don’t think I realized who he was until later and I remember being so impressed that the head of the company would take the time to address such a little issue.
I was able to add the blog component to my Blackboard course in under 5 minutes. Here’s how to do it in Blackboard 9.
First, find your control panel. It looks like this:
Then choose Course Tools, this is where you will find the link to set up your blog.
Once you click the Blogs link, you will find yourself at the Create Blogs screen which looks like this. Notice that there is drop down arrow where you can change your views – you can view All Blogs, My Blogs, Course Blogs, or Blogs Permitting Comments.
To create a blog, click Create Blog and you will find yourself at this screen
Enter the name of your blog and any description you’d like to add.
When I was setting up the blog for my students, I chose to make individual student blogs, i.e. each student would get their own blog to post to instead of having one main blog where everyone posts. I took the check mark off that would allow students to post anonymously (thinking that leaving it on encourage goofy comments), and put the checkmark on for “Allow users to edit and delete entries” because I thought it would be a good idea for students to be able to delete posts in case they double posted by accident or needed to edit it for some reason.
And that’s it – click SUMBIT and you’re done. I’ll follow up later this week with my thoughts about how the actual activity went with my students and a reflection on the whole blogging with students experience. If you have any questions about setting up or using a blog in Blackboard, please feel free to contact me by leaving a comment here, or sending me a message on my Twitter or to my e-mail monica AT scatteredbreadcrumbs.com.
