Why do we have to do a blog/website?
A blog is a contemporary form of engaging in reflective practice and contributing to a professional conversation within a learning community. The blog genre lends itself to documenting a learning journey. It also enables you to share your work to a wider audience such as your professional learning network.
The blog assignment is designed to form part of your professional ‘digital footprint’. It is very important that as innovative teachers you build a professional digital footprint in social media. In particular, those of you who are interested in following a career in teacher-librarianship and/or digital pedagogies need to develop an active web presence. You will need to use your activity in this area when applying for jobs and demonstrating to employers that you are fully engaged in contemporary media.
If you already have created a blog or website previously, you may be able to use this space. Please read more here to see if this is possible in your case.
How do I set up my blog?
Use a free web-based blog host such as: WordPress, Edublogs. Blogger. You may also use a website host such as Weebly, Wix.
If you have never set up a blog before, take the time to read this information which will gives you a detailed guide.
When creating your blog for LCN616 you must remember:
- The blog must be one available on the open web.
This is because you need to understand how the open/free Web 2.0 tools work in order to teach your own students and colleagues how to use them - You must activate a comments facility for each entry
- The blog must be open to everyone in the class to enable them to view and comment at any time
- You are free to use a pseudonym
Tips and Tricks:
- Choose a blog template that has a wide content bar to allow you space for images and tables (be aware that some blogs have a very narrow content section)
- Be aware that it might take many tries previewing different templates until you find one you like
- Many templates offer a fly-out or drop-down menu for Pages (like I’ve used on this website). This can be a useful feature in organising your blog.
- Be aware that table editing can be tricky in some blog tools. A work-around is to create a table in Word, then make a screenshot of the table which you then insert as an image. Here is a handy html table generator for those of you who would like to try html
- Create a blueprint for your blog so you can decide about whether your blog will be all Posts, all Pages, or a combination of both. Look at the examples provided for the ways in which previous students have set up their blogs in regard to Posts and Pages.
- When initially setting up your blog consider naming the url with a meaningful name that relates to the content rather than using your name, ID number or unit code. Using a metaphor may give your blog X-factor.
Examples from previous years:
https://theinquirystory.wordpress.com/book-one/
http://threadsofinquirylearning.weebly.com/
https://mazstar82.wixsite.com/flourishinquiry
https://doorstoinquiry.weebly.com/
As your blog is public you must only use images that are: created by you, or have a creative commons license, or are in the public domain, or that are ‘stock’ images provided by your blogging tool, or that you have written permission from the copyright holder to use. Please see more information on this page.
What writing style should I use?
For this blog, you should write in a professional, reflective and scholarly style.
Professional: Your colleagues are your reading audience. Imagine giving a professional development session at a staff meeting, or a conference presentation. Imagine your boss or a future employer reading your blog. That is the sort of tone and style you should adopt. You don’t need to use a highly formal academic style.
Reflective: Your feelings and opinions about teaching and learning are encouraged. You are an experienced educator, and you should use your experience to create a professional conversation.
Scholarly: Reference and cite all sources (hyperlink all open access sources). Write strong, clear and succinct topic sentences. Support the topic sentence with 2-4 sentences that provide evidence for the topic sentence. Each paragraph should have only one main idea. Start a new paragraph when you introduce a new idea.
Proofreading: Make sure you (or even better, a friend) reads all of your writing aloud. A great tip for is to extract each topic sentence in isolation from the paragraph and then read them all in order. The flow of your line of reasoning/argument should be apparent and the extracted topic sentences read in order should read like a summary of the piece.