How to Create a Group or Personal Blog
Blogs can be set up for use by a group of students. Students within the group may post entries. These may be viewed by or hidden from other students not in that group according to your preference. Instructors and / or students within the group and / or students not in the group may add comments to blog entries according to your preference.
Alternatively you may create a private blog / journal where students' entries are unseen by other students. As an instructor you may either view all the posts by all the students, or select the student whose posts you wish to view.
Edit Mode
1. Check that Edit Mode is turned ON. This can be switched by clicking ON or OFF.
Choose which content area
2. Choose the Content Area to which you wish to add your content. All the content areas work in the same way, if you have renamed or added content areas to your Blackboard course the screenshot above may vary from what you see.
Drop down menu
3. Hover your mouse over Add Interactive Tool and then click on Campus Pack Blog.
Name and description
4. Enter the name of the Group Blog, and a description. For example state which group will be using the blog and for what purpose.
Group or Private Blog?
5. Set the following options according to your preferences:
Make the blog available
Select this option to make the blog available to students.
Select the blog type
Choose Group Blog to create a Group Blog, or Private Journal to create a personal blog.
If you choose to set up a Private Journal then you may allow students to view instructor entries to the blog.
Enable an RSS feed?
Choose Yes to enable a public RSS feed for this blog. Choose No to disable RSS. If RSS is enabled, you will find an orange RSS button with the URL in the bottom right corner of the blog.
Be sure that you do not turn this feature on if there is sensitive information in the blog since RSS feeds are open to any internet user who knows the URL. If you don't know exactly what this option means, then leave the option off.
Select the value to use to reference users in the blog
Select Person Name or Person Name and Username so that the student’s name will appear beside their entries or comments.
Text direction for blog content
If you are building your blog in a language that is read right-to-left, such as Arabic, you can set the primary text direction. If no option is selected, all text in the blog will be displayed left-to-right by default.
Participants?
6. Select the students who will be participating in the group blog. You may choose to include all members of the course or select groups / single students. If you have already set up groups in your course, you may use those groupings. If you have not set up groups you can select the members from the list of students. Select the student/s and use the right pointing arrow to move them into the members list. The x icon will remove the selected student/s from the group.
Options
7. Set the following options carefully:
Allow students to permanently delete blog entries
Select No. Choose Yes only if students are allowed to permanently delete their entries from the blog.
Allow members to export their blog entries
Select this option if you wish to allow students to export their blog entries in the form of a zip file.
Allow members of the blog to...
Here you may control whether blog members may view / write / delete comments.
Date restrictions for editing?
8. If you wish to apply date restrictions for when changes to the blog may be made select these options according to your preference, otherwise leave them blank.
Please note that it is not currently possible to select dates beyond 2010. We are following this up with the product supplier.
What about students who are NOT members of this group?
9. Here you may decide whether students who are not members of the blog may view it, and / or leave comments:
Allow non-members to view the blog
Select this option if you would like non-members to be able to view the blog.
If yes, set date and time restrictions for viewing the blog
If you allow non-members to view the blog you may set when they may actually do this. For example you may want a group to create a blog, and then editing to stop (see previous slide) then you could enable the non-members to view the blog and comment on it.
Please note that it is not currently possible to select dates beyond 2010. We are following this up with the product supplier.
Allow non-members of the blog to...
Here you can set what non-members of the blog may do. You can allow them to view, write, and delete comments.
Grade Centre?
10. If you wish to assess this group blog and post a score in the Blackboard Grade Centre, then enter details into this section.
11. Click on OK to finish.
Viewing individuals entries
Note that when viewing the blog you can either view all entries by all students, or use the Filter to show only the entries made by a certain student.
If you change the filter to view a specific student's entries, and then change to view a different blog, you may find that the filter remembers which student you were viewing. To view all posts by students choose All Students.
News feeds