How to Post on Your Class Blog (Part 3 of 6)

This is Part 3 of a series of posts on using a blog for your class website.

There are multiple ways to create a new blog post. Blogger makes it easy and gives you many buttons to use. Anything that looks like a pencil or says "New Post" will bring up the editing page.

The editing page looks a lot like Google Docs or Word or any other writing tool. There are a few options along the right side:

• Labels allows you to tag posts with a keyword, or category, to make it easier for readers to find them. You can include as many keywords as you like.
• Schedule allows you to set a post to be published automatically at some future time.
• Permalink lets you customize the URL for this particular post; this is not very useful.
• Location adds a marker to the post indicating from where it was posted. This might be useful if you are posting from vacation or a field trip; otherwise, probably not.
• Options lets you enable or disable comments specifically for this post, overriding your settings for the entire blog.

As you are writing your post, Blogger will save the post automatically, just like Google Docs does. If you want to make extra sure that your post is saved, you can use the Save button in the upper right. If you want to see what your post will look like on your blog, click the Preview button. You can use the Close button to get back to your blog dashboard. But the important button here is Publish. Once you have written your post and previewed it, you need to click Publish to make it public.

In this picture, you can see that I've written two posts. The top one, however, has not been published, so it is still marked as "Draft". You can remove a post that has been published by using the "Revert to draft" button. You can also edit a published post by clicking on the title of the post in this list. You have several options to make edits, corrections, or additions, even if you have published a post.

How Often Should I Post?
Many teachers like to post weekly. Personally, I would post daily. At the end of each day, I wrote up what we did for that day while it was fresh in my mind. How often you post is up to you. Just make sure you can keep up with the schedule you decide, so students and parents know what to expect.