POTcert week 2 introduction

Hi everyone, and welcome back to week two of the Program for Online Teaching certification course. By now you should have already set up your own blog and figured out the URLs for your blog and for your RSS feed to add your site to the class. If you're having trouble, please ask for help. I'm glad to lend assistance as are the other moderators and mentors in the class Moving on to this week's work, we look at Rossen & Ko's overview of teaching online. I think the big takeaway here is that teaching online is much more about the teaching part than the online part. To be sure, there are certain technical skills that you need to teach online, but they aren't that advanced, and it's also much easier to pick up technical skills if you care about your teaching than it is to learn to care about teaching if you're really just into the technology. We'll be looking at a lot of different tools you can use throughout the year, but the point is to make the technology serve the course and not the other way around. Be sure to take the Beginner's Questionnaire and then apply the results to the Getting Started flowchart that Lisa made up to give you a starting point for how you might want to consider structuring your online class. Now that you've gotten your blog set up, we're going to work on some finer details First, we want to make sure that we're tagging posts appropriately. Tags are a form of metadata that act like an index. A list of tags can allow your readers to find posts, and a tag cloud can provide a visualization of what your blog is about. When you're writing your posts, either in WordPress or copying and pasting into WordPress if you prefer to compose offline, Scroll down on the right side of the page and you'll see a box to enter tags. Use keywords to describe what you're writing about. Some weeks the syllabus will specify tags to include in your posts, and the "potcert" tag is always appropriate, but be sure to include other descriptive words as you see fit. You can look at the tags others use in their blogs to get a sense of how people use tags. Just remember that tags are a folksonomy and not a taxonomy so by their nature they're idiosyncratic. It's your blog, and they're your tags, so don't get terribly hung up on getting it just exactly perfect according to somebody else's standard. We also want to look at moderation settings and how they affect comments on your blog. WordPress allows you as the blog owner a great deal of control over how you blog handles comments. You can disallow them entirely, but that kind of eliminates the discussion and social aspects of blogging. You can also set up your blog to let anyone to post a comment at any time. In between these extremes, you can manage the comments that appear on your blog, either by individually approving every post, or by requiring approval for the first comment that someone posts and then letting their comments appear automatically after that. If you don't keep right on top of approving posts, discussion can get bogged down. The syllabus suggests having unmoderated comments, but I'm too much of a control freak about my own blog to just allow anyone to post anything at any time, willy nilly. I prefer to approve the first comment, and then let people post at will. It's your blog to do as you see fit with, but discussion will work better if you choose one of these last two options, and allow either open comments or automatic commenting after a reader's first comment is approved. To change your moderation settings, first, go to your dashboard. Then, on the left side of the screen, go to settings and discussion, and you'll get a page of settings like this that will allow you to customize how you blog handles comments. If you want people to be able to comment automatically, without any approval from you, uncheck the boxes to the right of "Before a comment appears" that say "An administrator must always approve comments" and "Comment author must have a previously approved comment." If you want to review and approve the first comment a reader makes to your blog, leave the second box checked, as I have here.