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A blog is a personal online journal that is frequently updated and intended to share with others. Most blogs also have a commenting feature, so that people can respond to one another's thoughts. Blogs encourage students to clearly express their ideas. Blogs also address the need to expand various aspects of social learning. From the instructor's point of view, blogs are an effective means of gaining insight into students' activities and provide a way to share the knowledge and materials collected.
In Blackboard Learn, instructors create and manage blogs, and only enrolled users can view and create entries and comments in them. Similar to journals, you can use blogs for a graded assignment or gather opinions and information without assigning a grade.
Types of blogs
Blogs consist of two elements:
- Blog entries: Text, images, links, multimedia, social media, and attachments added by course members.
- Comments: Remarks or responses to blog entries made by other course members, including the instructor.
You can allow students to participate in blogs in three ways:
- Course blogs: You can create a course blog and choose the topic. All course members can add blog entries and comment on blog entries.
- Individual blogs: Students can add entries only to their own blogs. All other course members can view and add comments to it.
- Group blogs: If you enable the blogs tool for a group of users, they can perform these tasks:
- Group members can add blog entries and make comments on blog entries, building upon one another.
- All course members can view group blogs, but non-group members can only add comments.
You have full control over all blogs in your course. You can edit and delete entries in any of the blog types. You can also delete user comments.
Creating a Blog
- Under the Control Panel, expand Course Tools.
- Click on Blogs.
- Select Create Blog.
- Type a name and optional instructions. Make the blog available to students.
- Select the Display After and Display Until check boxes to enable the date and time selections. Display restrictions don't affect the blog availability, only when it appears.
- In the Blog Participation section, decide if the blog is for individuals or the course. You may also allow some anonymous posting.
- In the Blog Settings section, select Monthly or Weekly Index Entries. Optionally, select check boxes to allow users to edit and delete entries, or delete comments.
- In the Grade Settings section, select No grading or the Grade option and type the number of Points possible. Points possible will apply to one or more entries made by a user to the blog topic. After you enable grading, a column is created automatically in the Grade Center. The blog is permanently gradable, and you can't change the setting to No grading.
- If you want, select the check box for Show participants in needs grading status and select the number of entries required. If you apply this setting, the Needs Grading icon will show in the Grade Center. The entries will appear in the queue on the Needs Grading page after student activity meets this threshold.
- Add a rubric if you want.
- Select Submit once you are done configuring all the blog settings.
The blog topics appear in alphabetical order on the Blogs page. Select a column title to sort the contents.
You can also add links to blogs in course areas, such as content areas and folders.
