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Creating Your First Blog
by Jim Hollis

This post is about creating a blog. I could start with giving you the wikipedia definition of what a blog is and then proceed to confuse you even more. I won't do that. Let's keep things simple.

A blog is a webpage that you can add information to very easily. That's it; nuff said. If you keep that definition in your head, you're going to be just fine as we proceed in creating our own personal website; oh, excuse me, I mean blog.

Feel free to ponder the other definitions of a blog. They are all valid. If you watched the Common Craft video on What is a Blog from my last post entitled Sharing Educational Content Using a Blog, it will give you an idea of why blogs have become so popular. So popular that according to Common Craft, there are over 70 million blogs. Having that many blogs on the Internet can only mean one thing: Anyone has the ability to create a blog (a website) and post (write) about anything they want without any specialized knowledge of web design.

So, let's create a blog...

1. The first step will be to choose what software we will use to create our blog. Don't worry, you don't need to download anything! You probably won't even realize you're using software. To create our blog and put stuff on our blog, we just go to a website and fill in stuff on a form and voila, our website gets updated!

I will be demonstrating how to create your blog using Google's software called Blogger. Other blogging websites include, Wordpress, Typepad, and Edublogs. All of these do the same thing and all of them are either free or cost very little money. As with most things provided by Google, Blogger is FREE.

2. The next step will be to think of a good name for your blog address and your blog title. Your blog address (the URL) will be http://____________.blogspot.com and you will be able to choose what gets put in the blank. For example, two of my favorite blogs are http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com (The Cool Cat Teacher Blog) and http://witmanwisdom.blogspot.com (Witman's Wisdom). Notice that the blog title and what you put in the blank do not have to be the same although they should be close. For example, if your name is Joe you might want a blog that's titled "Joe's Blog" and your address to be http://joesblog.blogspot.com. I'll leave the creativity up to you! By the way, you will need to make sure no one else is using your blog address. This will be explained in the video in step 3.

3. The next thing I will do to help prepare you is have you to watch a very short video about creating your first blog using Blogger. The first part of this video will demonstrate how to create a Google account if you don't have one already. If you already have a Google account, you will not need to go through this initial process although you're more than welcome to create a brand new account if you want to.

Click here to watch video

I love that video! It comes from the people at Freevlog and it does a very good job (a great job!) introducing how to use Blogger to set up you first ever blog.

4. The next step is to create your blog! Yeah! You will want to follow the directions from Freevlog's video in step 3 to get started. To summarize what you learned in the video:

Okay, so head on over to the Blogger site and create your blog! Woo Hoo!

5. So how'd ya do? Don't worry if you make a mistake. You can always delete this blog or create a new one. Blogger lets you create multiple blogs all under your Google account so you don't have to get it right on the first try. Just have fun playing around.

That is exactly what you should do here in Step 5...PLAY!!!! You can browse around your Blogger Dashboard and get familiar with the different options. There will be certain things on the settings tab that will cause you to scratch your head. Don't worry about these things right now. They're really not important at this point (or ever). I would recommend playing around with the various templates and choose one that fits your personality.

If you would like to learn more about Blogger, I have the absolute best resource! It's actually a blog called "Magic With Blogs" and it has over 100 short video tutorials for how to use Blogger.

I hope you're wondering if I have any educational blogs of my own. I am currently in the process of creating a new blog for my Team in Training program. I also maintain a blog (created in Typepad) called Teachers Love SMART Boards. This blog is my contribution to the educational knowledge base and it contains resource for teachers who use a SMART Board interactive whiteboard in their classroom. It is also a great example of what a blog can look like after a few months of updates. The newest addition to my blog was to add my Twitter updates directly to my blog. Very cool!

My next post (to this blog) will discuss how to add things like videos, pictures, and files to your blog so you can share them on your new blog! Please check out my previous blog posts on the Digital Learning Environment site for more information on producing cool educational content. This is the kind of stuff you'll want to include in your blog.

Please let everyone know about your blog by sending a comment with your blog's address. I'd love to see what you've created!

 Jim is an Education Consultant working to help teachers use technology to create student-centered learning environments. Jim has 8 years experience in the classroom and has a Masters Degree in Education and a BS Degree in Computer Science. Jim is currently working on creating online learning environments for teacher professional development programs. Jim can be reached at mail@teacheronlinetraining.com