Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:
- Do you want to be online vs. offline?
- Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
- Do you want to have your blog public vs. private? (Note, you can set individual blog posts private or password protected or have an entire blog set to private)
- Have you considered whether you are posting within or outside of Canada? This blog on opened.ca is hosted within Canada. That said, any public blog posts can have its content aggregated/curated onto social networks outside of Canada.
First tasks you might explore with your new blog:
- Go into its admin panel found by adding /wp-admin at the end of your blog’s URL
- Add new category or tags to organize your blog posts – found under “Posts” (but do not remove the pre-existing “edtechuvic” or “Distributed & Open” categories)
- See if your blog posts are appearing on the course website (you must have the course categories assigned to a post first and have provided your instructor with your blog URL)
- It can take an hour or so for your posts to appear on the course site.
- Add an “About Me” or a page welcoming visitors to your site.
- Embed images or set featured images and embed video in blog posts and pages (can be your own media or that found on the internet, but consider free or creative commons licensed works, like found at unsplash.com or pexels.com)
- Under Appearance:
- Select your preferred website theme and customize to your preferences (New title, etc.)
- Customize menus & navigation
- Use widgets to customize blog content and features
- Delete this starter post and the test posts.