Why and How I made this blog. By Alex Miller

the quern stone

Why I Made this Blog….

I am finding that more people are using Web 2.0 tools to collaborate, like blogs and wikis and they are using rss feeds to feed all the info and news from these various sources into their own environment (see post on RSS) particularly in education.

Sites like pbwiki and blogger are a great place to start, but edublogs seems to offer the most flexibility, add-ons and pure educational power. Soon, you will want to offer your students more than some of the other free blogging tools allow you to (like media rich content, videos and podcasts of blog posts).

There are many teachers successfully using these tools in the classroom to upload/point to resources and engage students through collaborative discussion, resource sharing and to monitor student work.
Students are more often using online tools, like Flickr, del.icio.us and Lastfm in their day-to-day life to network, learn and collaborate with like minded people. These sites use tags (keywords/ metadata), tags are links that can be clicked on to find sites with similar or relative content.

The demand for easier, efficient and more flexible ways of teaching and learning is rising. Interest in web-based learning and exploring new technology for more engaging delivery is increasing as the much discussed generation gap becomes more of an issue.

I made this blog in the hope that it might be of use to colleagues that want to explore some of these tools and for my friends (the ones that don’t call me nerd) that might be interested in what Web Tools are and how they could use them in their life. And so, my mission is to delve into some of these tools and technologies and explore how they can be used in teaching & learning environments. What better way to do this than with a blog? An online journaling tool.

How I Made this Blog….

I tried setting up with blogger, but I didn’t get the control or flexibility I needed, as far as adding other tools and themes to the blog - yes, I’m a control freak

So I visited one of my favourite blogs to see how it was made. Veerle’s Blog is Powered by some software called Expression Engine. It looked great, so I downloaded the software and read the instructions. It involved setting up an MySQL Database and configuring some php pages. Although I’ve worked with this type of technology before, I really didn’t have time to revisit it. So I went hunting for a more simple option. I have a web space (web hosting) already and wanted to use my own domain name (flairandsquare.com)

Option 1.

This is when I found Wordpress. Wordpress actually offers to install everything to your web space for you for free - Install4Free (very handy). I provided them with my hosting details and within a day, it was all ready to go.

You can set-up a blog for free on the WordPress site which is less technical and they have plenty of tools and themes ready for you to use, but again, I wanted to get my hands dirty.

Note: once installed, delete your old default page from your web space.

Once set-up, you need to log in to your new blog (with the provided details) and you are then free to explore the features of a wordpress blog.

The first thing I did was choose a theme for my site. I chose the iTheme. It’s very cool (looks like a Mac desktop and you can click and drag the boxes on the right around), it took some configuring, but the simplicity that has resulted is worth it I think.

The free WordPress Blog has many themes and plug-ins already set-up for you to use. WordPress is also the power behind edublogs, which I highly recommend for flexibility, creativity, choice of themes and plug-ins and the fact that you can very easily embed media.

Things I’ve Learnt

Make sure you choose a theme and set-up your plug-ins before adding content.
Back your site up regularly while you’re building it (if you are using wordpress on your own server, otherwise, you don’t need to worry about this part)
Create lots of profiles in all the social networking sites (listed below) and list your site in as many places, sites as you can. To improve your blog rating and ranking in Google, visit other blogs and leave comments on other educators postings.
Don’t do it yourself when there are so many good free options for educators out there that offer everything you will need.
Explore, try, fail. Explore. Try something else.