Tech Tip Tuesday: Building a better blog, Now with pages!

UEN Professional Development has long had classes using various Google Tools.  We have also taugh Blogger as a tool teachers can usein various classes but especally in Web Publishing for Everyone. That course has had a minor face lift and is now Web Publishing for Teachers and doesn't place as much emphasis on Blogger. Blogger has been a good tool, but Blogger had it's drawbacks, too.  The tech tip today is all about how those drawbacks are disappearing.

One of the drawbacks to Blogger for Education was the fact that many teachers want to have some static pages with information about their class, rules, guidelines, or even contact information that don't change.  Blogs by nature are very dynamic.  Just recently Blogger announced that a Blogger in Draft feature was graduating.  You can now add up to 10 pages and a new pages widget that allows your readers to visit them easily.

A second drawback was the fact that due to the public nature of blogs and their social nature many blogs contain content that is at best distracting in the schools and at worst.... well they can get pretty bad.  Another way the disadvantages of Blogger and other web based blog tools is disapearing is by the continued improvements in my.uen. Utah Educators who register with a school email can now use my.uen's new blog tool to add blogs to their pages.  You can maintain different blogs for different classes and display the same blog posts on multiple pages.  The blog tool in my.uen is a great improvement to the services available for Utah Educators.  This week on Thursday at 3:30 pm MT visit http://www.uen.org/facultylounge to join our weekly live Webinar and Victoria Rasmussen will be teaching how to use my.uen's new Blog tool. If you miss the  live webcast, you can always check it out in our archives.

Useful links for my.uen

http://www.uen.org/my.uen/help/

http://www.uen.org/my.uen/help/blogs.shtml