Blogs

Communication & collaboration tools / Guides

What are Blogs and Journals?

Blogs and Journals are a collaborative tool that can create more significant interaction between you and your students. A journal entry can include links to resources, multimedia, and text. Unlike a blog, journals can only be viewed and commented on by teaching staff, not by other students in the course. Blogs can be viewed and commented on by other course members.

Why would I use a Blog or Journal?

Blogs can be used to allow students to reflect on learning experiences or activities. They can also be used to enable students to share opinions and resources.

Journals can be used to allow students to reflect on learning experiences or activities. Some common uses for journals can make reflections on personal growth throughout the semester, document experiences, and understanding of material throughout the semester.

Several ways Blogs can be set up

Individual Blog

Blogs may be made available to individuals, where a student sees their entries just like a journal. In Blackboard, individual blogs can automatically be set up for all course users.

Course Blog

Course blogs give you the option to set up one blog for the course that all students and teaching staff can contribute to. This is useful when there is a topic to be addressed.

Group Blog

When setting up Blackboard groups, you have the option to setup tools for each group, including blogs and journals. All group members can add blog entries and make comments on blog entries.

Individual Journal

Journals are created by course instructors and can be made public or private. Private journals allow students to communicate privately with the instructor. If you choose to make your journal public, this allows all course members to view all entries. It can be controlled under your journal settings Permit Course Users to View Journal.

Other Considerations

Other tools you should consider as well as blogs and journals are:

Discussion Board: A discussion board should be used for short-question-and-answer-style collaboration between students.

Wiki: A wiki is a collaborative space where students can add and edit content, which is usually used for group projects.

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