Before proceeding with this first blog post, we expect you to consider your privacy preferences carefully and that you have considered the following options:

  1. Do you want to be online vs. offline?
  2. Do you want to use your name (or part thereof) vs. a pseudonym (e.g., West Coast Teacher)?
  3. 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)
  4. 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:

  • Edit your about page as you wish
  • Experiment with formatting posts, embedding images, videos, and other multimedia or explore how to set featured images for your blog posts and pages. These can be your own media or that found on the internet. Please respect author’s rights and learn about free or creative commons licensed works.
  • 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 page (or switch it to draft status if you want to keep for reference). You can setup your home page to show the latest updates or have a welcome page that persists.

I have created a category for EDCI 570/1. Please use it for any posts related to our courses. You may consider creating your categories for each course that you take should you wish to document your learning (or from professional learning activities outside of formal courses). Keep note, however, that you may wish to use the course topic as the category name as opposed to the course number as those outside of your program would not be familiar with the number.

Lastly, as always, be aware of the FIPPA as it relates to privacy and share only those names/images that you have consent to use or are otherwise public figures. When in doubt, ask us.

Please also review the resources from our course website for getting started with blogging:

Photo by Flickr user jfchenier under CC license: BY-NC 2.0