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Using a Blog in my Internet Class

I'm going to be having my students use blogs in the course CPSC 104, a course without prerequisites about the Internet.

I'm assuming that a blog will provide one outlet for the writing I want them to do in the class. I'm particularly concerned about writing for the Web in ways that are interesting, informative, and substantial. I feel pretty comfortable with ways to do that, since I've been doing that with students for sometime, but not through a blog. I also want to use a blog as a means to have students think about presentation issues and some elementary HTML. I will eventually want them to include hyperlinks and images in their blog entires, and I'm assuming (again) that some will want to spruce/spice up their blog entries.

Questions I have deal with how to introduce students to using a blog in ways that allow them to How to deal with the notion of a blog in a structured way. Some thoughts are for me to:

• introduce the notion of a blog and show several examples
  
• include in a list of HW questions they have to answer, some questions about blogs and also ask them to name, briefly describe, and give the URLs for 3 blogs they find interesting
  
• show them in class how to set up a blog with blogger.com
  
• have them do an in-class lab where they set up a blog at blogger.com
  
• over a week or so, give them some specific topics to write about in their blogs
  
• at the end of the first week of their using a blog, we'll talk about RSS and show them how to use a news aggregator to check on other blogs.
  
• during the second week of their using a blog require them to include one or more hyperlinks in a blog entry
  
• After that we'll see where it all goes - what other things they want to do with HTML.
  

Posted by ernie at August 21, 2004 09:06 PM