Create blogs in Scholar

This document refers to blogs in Original View Scholar courses. Blogs and Journals have been combined in Ultra courses; for more information, refer to the documentation here. 

Scholar has a tool that allows student to create blogs, and instructors to grade them.

By default, the blog tool is hidden from students.  To show the tool to students, click on the dropdown next to Blogs and click “Show Link”

The link will then be displayed to students. Clicking this link will take you directly to the Blogs tool. There, you can create and then link to the Blogs you wish to use in your class. For students it is a page that allows them to navigate to the course's Blogs.

This page lists all the Blogs in the course.

You can edit (use the echelon symbol next to the name) and alter availability here (use edit, or the check boxes and Availability button). Also, note that under Entries any material you have not read yet will be listed as 'new'.

To start a Blog, you click on 'Create Blog'. On the Create Blog page you'll put in quite a bit of information.

A title must be entered for the Blog. You can then include the instructions for the Blog. This can be as little as referencing pre-existing assignment descriptions or a comprehensive entry on protocols, expectations and grading mechanisms for the Blog. Your instructions can include links, attachments and other resources.

Next, choose whether or not you want the blog to be available. Generally, the selection here is 'yes'. If you wish to manually control availability and do not the blog accessible by students until a later date you can select no here.

. Next, use the Date and Time Restructions to control the window of time in which the blog is available for student view. *You must have 'yes' selected under Availability for these to work. In this example the blog does not open for student use until the second week of the term (August 30th) and remains open until a time yet to be determined.

The next set of options determine whether you are using a single blog or assigning each student the task of maintaining a blog under the title (theme) provided.

Individual to All Students is a selection meaning that every student will have a blog they are expected to maintain. Each student will also be able to look at every other student’s blogs and add comments.

Course is a selection that creates a single blog in which all members of the course can create entries (or posts) as well as adding comments.

In either case you may choose to allow comments in response to blog writings to be entered anonymously (by choice of the comment author).

Finally, choose the housekeeping settings for the blog. You can set a weekly or monthly time frame for the indexing of blog entries. This cleans up the look of the blog moving entries to an index whereby you can still steer to older entries. If you require a high volume of entries then weekly is probably the better choice here.

You can opt whether or not to allow users to edit and delete their own entries and comments. In this case, adjustments to the blog can still be made after you have entered grades.

You select whether or not the blog is graded in section 6. If graded you'll need to enter the points possible or attach a rubric, you’ll also see the option to select how many entries should occur before seeing the ‘needs grading’ prompt on the blog page and in the grade center. A column will be created in the Grade Center once you submit this page.

*The button to add a rubric is only visible once ‘Grade’ has been selected.

If the rubric has point values you will be prompted to accept that total as the value for the Points Possible field.

**While the rubric can be created during this step, it is generally a better work flow to create rubrics separately prior to creating the assignment and simply attach them to the assignment.

Once all your settings have been entered, hit submit. At this point students can enter information into their blogs and you can navigate to their blogs to read, comment and grade.