Setting Up Your Blog Account

As I mentioned in the orientation message, our discussions in this course take place outside of Blackboard on a specially designed blog. This will give everyone a wider range of resources and tools for posting messages, images, and links. It also makes it much easier to organize our comments and posts around the topics covered this semester.

Blogging is easy and there's lots of help available if you run into difficulties.

Here are some step-by-step instructions for joining our blog. And here's a Quicktime movie (4 minutes) with screen images walking you through the steps for setting up a username or account at Wordpress. It may take a minute or two for the movie to download. If you don't have a Quicktime player, you can download one for free here.

The instuctions below are for those students who do not have an account or username at Wordpress. If you do have an account or username, just send your username and the email address you registered with Wordpress to me and I'll add you to the blog.

For everyone else, here are the moves.

Step 1: Go to the Worpress website (http://www.wordpress.com) by clicking on "Wordpress" in the course menu in Blackboard.

Step 2: Click on Sign Up Now on the Wordpress homepage.

Step 3: Fill out the brief form and choose either to register a username or create an account. The username will give you full access to our course blog and I'll give you authoring privileges so that you can create and edit your own posts. The full account will enable you to join our course blog and create your own blogs.

Step 4: Be sure to click the legal flotsam box to accept their terms and then hit "Next".

Step 5: A voila...you now have a Wordpress account! But you're not done yet! The next step is to send me your username and the email address you registered with Wordpress. This is the info I need to add you to the course blog as an author. You may also want to personalize your account by adding a picture and other info.

That's all there is to it...if all goes well. If not, try the Support link on the Wordpress homepage. If you can't get the help you need there, let me know.