This Monday we’ll continue our journey into the blogging world and show you a few more of the features to help get you started.

Multimedia Monday is on at 3:00 p.m. in the library.

Thanks to those who came to this week’s Multimedia Monday sessions and started with signing up to blogs.

One thing that came up was blog privacy, and excluding your class blog from search engines and the like.

When using edublogs, there is a process in the admin controls that you may want to enable.

1. Click on the “Options” tab
2. Click on the “Privacy” sub-tab
3. Tick the box next to “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors”
4. Click on the “Update options” button

This process means it’s far more likely that people can’t find your blog simply by googling it, but would need to know the address (or follow a link to it from another site, such as perhaps our school website or Intranet).

We’ve included a screen shot with the steps marked out to help you with this simple process.

We’ve started a few at St. Michael’s, and now a few teachers are interested in starting them with the classes. But just what exactly is a blog?

Well, without going into the blatently obvious (hello… this is a blog!), the term blog comes from the term Web Log. Knowing that, it is easy to see how blogs may have begun, giving opportunity to provide a sort of online diary.

Over time, however, blogs have become much, much more. They are different things to different people. Our blog, Technoblog, for example, is more of an online news service than a diary entry.

So why blog? A number of teachers would remember (back in those halcyon days when we had nothing but PowerMacs in our classrooms) trying to put together class web pages. Quite simply, the time involved in learning how to build web pages, then teaching it to the students, then actually doing the building, made it impossible to make any real continued progress. Even then, it only was visible over the Intranet, so the audience was limited to school staff and students. To post to a blog (that is to add a new entry) is really as simple as logging in, typing up your post and clicking on the “Publish” button. The audience is also bigger. Now students can have a potentially worldwide audience – yes, now our busy parents can get on the net and see what their children are doing at school.

Having a class blog on the Internet does have its safety issues, but good common sense will see most potential problems avoided. Choosing the right blog service will also mean that comments and posts that students make can be moderated by an administrator (e.g. class teacher) before being put out into cyberspace.

Over the rest of our Multimedia Monday sessions this term, we will look at getting started with blogs. Next week begins with signing up and the very beginnings of getting your blog set up. So come along and join us.

In the meantime, here are a few links to help you get started on just what exactly a blog is, or can be:

Wikipedia entry on Blog
Blogger’s Introduction (informative, but also sales-pitchy)
Bibliosphere News Posts on Blogging
Bibliosphere News is a library-focused blog by Judy O’Connell (Libraries Education Officer, CEO Parramatta) and contributed to by librarians across the Diocese. They have several posts on blogging.

Have a look around, be inspired, enjoy!