Welcome to the FNED 346 Blogging Adventure!

Sometime before September 17 you will set up your own blog to use this semester for all your Talking Points assignments and to keep track of your thoughts about any of the issues we cover. A blog is your very own personal online journal. It is public, in that your classmates and I can read it and comment on it, but it is your space and you can control most of it. (If you want to make it private so that “only” members of this class can read it, we will figure out how to do that together. In the context of this course, your blog has two purposes: Your blog will provide a space for you to keep all of your Talking Points Assignments over the course of the semester together. You will not hand in written assignments to me each week; rather you will post them on your blog. In this sense your blog is merely your assignment notebook that you will use as you read and prepare for class each week. You will also be posting any additional thoughts you have: responses to class discussion afterthoughts, things you forgot to say in class, relevant experiences you have, reflections about your service learning assignment as they relate to the readings. Creating your own blog will also introduce you to the blogisphere if you do not know this place already. I hope you will discover creative educational uses for this online medium. You will see how easy it is to use wordpress.com and perhaps it will inspire you to bring blogs into your own classroom someday. To start you will go to https://wordpress.com. Select Get Started and follow the directions to create your own blog on that website. Be sure to select the “free” option. Follow the instructions to open a free account. do not forget your Username and Password: You will need them to login every time. As you fill in the information, you will be asked to name your blog. The title will appear at the top of your blog. Mine is called FNED 346 06 Fall 2018. Then you need to choose an address: Mine is https://schoolinginginademocraticsociety.wordpress.com This will be the web address associated with your site.You can call it anything you like. e clever or simple (or both). It is up to you. You will also need to choose a design template for your blog. Look through the options listed and see what appeals to you. You can change this later. Once you have the free account set up you can start posting. A “posting” is an entry on your blog. For clarification, you can 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 left that says Publish. Your post will not appear on your blog until you publish it. You can always go back and edit old posts and create new ones. Your First Post Your first post should be a short introduction to you: who are you, how your semester is going so far, what do you do when you are not in class, etc. (Just a short paragraph – no big deal). You will post the rest of the entries as they are due (see course syllabus for dates) , or whenever you have something to say! When you are done creating your site and posting your first entry, please come back to this blog and, at the end of my first posting (scroll down), post a comment that includes your blog address so that I can link it to my site. Good Luck! JS:)