WELCOME!

Welcome to our class! Over the next 15 weeks, we will be doing a significant amount of work online, and blogging will the main tool we use to share thoughts, ideas, and questions with each other.

What is a blog?

According to the Oxford American Dictionary, a blog is:
"personal website or web page on which an individual records opinions, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis." 

It is public writing, in that I and your classmates can read it and comment on it, but it is your space and you can control most everything about it. (If you want to make it private so that *only* members of this class can read it, you can follow the instructions here).


Why blog?

In the context of this course, your blog has two purposes:

1) Your blog will provide a space for you share strategies and activities with each other. But importantly, your blog is a public space and as you post (and comment on others'), you will gain a much richer understanding of ideas from, and beyond, class. I want you to think of it as interactive and intertextual in that way.

2) Blogging is a great way to experiment with multimodality and intertextuality.  Multi-modality - simply put - refers to the ways we can juxtapose or combine images/videos with text to create meaning. Movie posters, album covers, and memes are perhaps the most obvious example of this, but bloggers do it too. What do the colors, fonts, and images tell you about this album? -->

Intertextuality refers to the ways different texts "speak to each other" or shape each other to create meaning. A hyperlink is almost like a portal to one text within another text. Comments on a blog or social media post would be another example. Or perhaps the most obvious example would be "quoting" another author. 
<-- How are the different texts in this image interacting?

 

3)Creating your own blog will also introduce you to the blogosphere if you don't know this place already. I hope that you will discover creative educational uses for this online medium. You will see how easy it is to use blogger.com, and perhaps it will inspire you to bring blogs into your own classroom. 

It's a way of communicating by networking or connecting information....

If you do not already have a Google account, you will need to create one.  If you do have a Google account, sign in in the box at the right.  This will allow you to create your own blog on a site called blogger.com.   

Click the button that says NEW BLOG (you will see this even if you have blogged before) and follow the instructions to get started.  Don't forget your Username and Password!! You will need them to login everytime. Please write them down on the top of your syllabus so you don't forget!  

As you fill in the info, you will be asked to give your blog a TITLE. This title will appear at the top of your blog.

Then, you need to choose an address: http://_______.blogspot.com  This will be the web address associated with your site. You can call it anything you like. Be clever or simple (or both) -- it is up to you. Write it down so you don't forget it! (You can also find it later on in your Dashboard where all of your future blogs will be listed.)  

You will also need to choose a design/theme template for your blog. Look through the options listed and see what appeals to you. You can change this later so don't worry too much about it initially... Once you have the account set up, you can start posting. A “posting” is an entry on your blog. (For clarification, you have one blog, but many postings). Give the post a title and then compose as you would any journal entry. When you are finished, hit the button at the bottom that says Publish. It will not appear on your blog until you publish it. You can always go back and edit old posts and create new ones.

When you are done creating your site and posting your first entry, please come back to this blog and post a comment at the end of my first posting (scroll down) that includes your blog address so that I can post it in the link list to the right.

Some Tips and Helpful Hints:

• Once you are in your blog, look at to the left of the screen. If you click on the word THEME, you will be able to make design changes, like playing around with fonts and colors (You can only do this if you are logged in to your blog.)
• In the POST screen, you can edit a post by clicking on it and adding updates.
• Poke around online and make a list of websites related to education, media literacy, social justice or anything else relevant and post them on your blog. You can add all kinds of things by ADDING A GADGET from your LAYOUT screen.
• Just do the best you can with this. If you get stuck, don't fret... I am happy to help you anytime as you work on getting this started. And remember: you can't break it. It is just a blog. Everything can be changed if need be!

Good luck!!