Welcome and Introduction

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:

• 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 cat­e­gories or sub-cat­e­gories).  If you would like to add more course cat­e­gories, please do so (e.g., add EDCI 306A with no space for Music Ed, etc.)
• 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)
• Add pages
• 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)
• 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 (or switch it to draft sta­tus if you want to keep for reference)

Do con­sid­er cre­at­ing 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 as opposed to the course num­ber as those out­side of your pro­gram would not be famil­iar with the num­ber (e.g., we use “Mul­ti­me­dia Learn­ing” instead of “edci337).

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.