Module 3 Reflection

Talk about the process of starting your portfolio blog, what challenges you faced, and what you learned.

I started a blog on WordPress years ago, but deleted it because I had created blogs on much more user-friendly sites—BrP Bytes on Blogger and Looking Backwards on Edublogs. I couldn’t reactivate my old blog name on WordPress, but was able to add a new blog name under my already-existing account. It’s taken a few days, but I believe I’ve finally gotten it set up according to the criteria of the assignment. WordPress seems very difficult to change once you’ve set things up a certain way: I really had to play with the “My Site” drop-downs and do a lot of Refreshing before I could get the pages, categories, tags, and menus set up the way it was asked for in the assignment. On the other hand, now that I’ve gotten familiar with it, I don’t think it will be hard to add things properly (at least I hope not).

I would never use WordPress to teach a student how to set up a blog—I still think Blogger and Edublogs are easier for beginners. Now that I’ve worked through the WordPress setup, I can see it has quite a bit more functionality for someone who wants to have a more robust personal site than that offered by Blogger; however, for a teacher to set up for classroom use, Edublogs (which actually is a WordPress platform) is still a better site—they’ve customized it for educational needs and it’s very easy to add and manage whole classes of student blogs.

Once I finished everything else for the assignment, I added the second widget: I chose a countdown for the JumpStart course, to keep me positive about accomplishing my goal to increase my technological skills and learn tools that will increase student engagement and achievement.

When finished with this course, I will probably go back to my BrP Bytes site on Blogger for writing about technology, but if I’m ever wanting a very professional blogging presence, I’ll definitely be going with WordPress.

One thought on “Module 3 Reflection

  1. I love Edublogs too, although since we have fifth grade in our middle school we used Kidblog.org. This year I tried Blogger — I found a school in Australia who had directions for setting up school-based blogger accounts. It takes about 10 minutes to set up each blog. I couldn’t give admin control to the kids — I’d need to monitor daily because they really don’t know what’s inappropriate; they only know what they like! I would not do that next year; I would go back to Kidblog where kids have some personalization control. Again, you have so much to share with others! Keep blogging!

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