Time for action—creating your first Mahara blog
- Click into My Portfolio in the main menu and then into My Blogs in the sub-menu bar of your Mahara. You already have one blog ready for you to used. It will be named according your own name—for example, Neil Martin's blogs.
- Rather than posting in the default blog, let's start by seeing how to make a brand new one. Click on the button in the top right-hand corner labeled Add Blog.
- Click on the button in the top right-hand corner of the My Blogs panel called Add Blog.
- On the next screen, you will have to enter a title and description for your blog. Mahara handily gives you some examples of the kind of titles and descriptions that could be used. You can also add some tags for your blog in just the same way as you added tags for your files earlier on. Go ahead and fill in the information, and when you have finished, click Create Blog.
- You will see your new blog displayed on your My Blogs page. Neil has already started making a few blogs in his Mahara, and he can see this:
- Now that we have created our first blog, let's see how we can add posts to it. Click on the name of the blog you created earlier in the far left-hand column. Here you will see a button called Settings; click it. This will take you back to the page you first edited when you set up your blog. You will also see the words: No posts yet. Add one!. So, let's do just that.
- Click the Add Post button to add post. You will see the familiar options to add title, body, and tags again. Remember that this time you are adding a single blog post. Neil is currently entering a post called May Report into his EE Progress Reports blog which is aimed at his boss:
- Scroll down the page. You will see that you have some more really useful options available here. Click Add a file to add a file to your blog from either your hard drive or your Mahara file system.
- You also have the option to toggle this post as a Draft by placing the check mark in the check box. This means that should you choose to allow access to a view containing your blog in the future, this particular post will remain private until you take away that check mark. In this set up, Neil, for example, can work on his monthly report blog posts as and when he wants to but can release them for his boss's view only when he feels they are ready to go. Click Save post to finish.
- After your blog post is published, you will see the date of posting, and you will have the options to edit and delete it later:
- As you add posts to your blog, your blog will display the most recent post first.
What just happened?
You just learned to use blogs within Mahara. Later in this chapter, you will be seeing how you can add these to your Profile Page that you started editing in Chapter 2,Getting Started with Mahara.
You should now be starting to think about the kinds of blogs that you would like to write. Perhaps you want to write an end-of-week report, which you will want to share with your boss, or with your students. Perhaps you would like to write a funny weekend diary to share with a few of your friends. Perhaps you have a passion—a topic that you want to go public with and share your rants and ramblings with the world. Don't be scared to have a go—nobody needs to look if you don't want them to. Remember this is for you—it doesn't have to be perfect.
We just saw how to create a blog and add posts to it. You have to be careful in Mahara to understand the difference between the two. A blog should be given a more general name, and will contain blog posts related to the subject area. For example, a blog may be entitled "My fitness regime". The blog posts are the individual entries to the blog. A blog entry to the fitness regime blog may be called "Day 1—Gym session".
----- Neil from Training 4 Work thinks -----
Embedding an image in your blog post
We saw in the last Time for action section that Neil has made a very simple textual blog post. One great feature of Mahara is that you are able to add audio, video, and images to your blog posts. To do this, when creating your blog post, click on the Add file button at the bottom of the blog post creation screen. Then use the Select button to select the file to add it to your blog:
Now that the file has been added to your post, you can use the image upload icon in the body of your post to include the file you just added. You saw how to use this icon in the last chapter. Once you have added the image to your post, you are able to align it and resize it as you wish.
Pop quiz— blogging in Mahara
- What can a blog be used for?
A. Reflect on your own experiences
B. Show other people what you are thinking about
C. Both of the above.... and more
- Apart from using simple text blogs what can you do to make your Mahara blogs more attractive?
----- Punam from Pennytown Primary thinks -----
Have a go hero—go on... get reflecting...
As a Personalized Learning Environment, Mahara is very keen to get you reflecting on your learning, and blogs are a key tool for you to use to do that. If you take time to sit down and express what you understand about something in writing, you will generally find that you come out of the experience knowing and understanding more about your topic area than you did before you started.
If you are blogging already, try blogging in Mahara. If you have never blogged before, get started now, you really won't regret it!
Reflecting is one of the most important parts of the portfolio process. Helen Barrett and Jonathon Richter of the University of Oregon have developed a good set of resources on the subject; it's worth a look: http://sites.google.com/site/reflection4learning/home.
We are going to finish this chapter by revisiting our Profile Page.