The Blog Posting Past and The Upcoming Email Agenda

 Last class was Thursday, October 15, and the main topic was blog settings, specifically publishing posts. After everyone signed in to their blogs, we talked about the area you immediately see, which Blogger calls the Dashboard. We spent some time learning about the Dashboard, so...

A Good Day for Blogging

This is a nice day for learning about blogs! Last Tuesday was very wet, but today the sun is shining. I'm enjoying the day! This is an example of a blog post. This one is a text message with an image added. Also, click on the video to watch instructions on navigating the Blogger Dashboard!

E and B Review In Brief

The current topics can be broken into two parts:

1.) Email.
2.) Blogs.


1.) Email:
We talked about email use with Google, including:
> Creating an email account with Google (Gmail).
> Logging in to Google's Gmail accounts.
> Opening email messages received in the Inbox.
> Replying to email messages that have been read.

2.) Blogs:
We learned about blog use with Google, including:
> Creating a blog account with Google (Blogger).
> Logging in to Google's Blogger accounts.
> Viewing your blog from your Blogger account Dashboard.
> Publishing a blog post from your Dashboard.

There was more (such as uploading pictures to our blogs), but those were the two main topics. More to come on the next post, as well as a preview of the next class!
Cheers!

Email and Blog Review - Part 2

This post covers some other aspects of what we did in class October 8, 2009.
Besides creating an email account with Google, we also signed up with Google's service called "Blogger," to create our own blogs. (To review how to log in to your Google email account, scroll down and read the previous post "Email and Blog Review - Part 1." )
We practiced getting to our blogs, selecting a blog style from the templates they provide, writing our first post and publishing it onto our blog, as well as uploading a picture to publish onto our blog. It was a fun class!

Email and Blog Review - Part 1

Today was a great day of class! With a lot to learn about blogging, (notice how we even use it as a verb), we spent most of the class working on blogs. However, we started with a review of email. Since we're using the program Blogger to create our blogs, we have to have a Google email account (called Gmail). (Blogger is owned by Google, so your account works for both.)


Here are step by step instructions on logging in to Gmail...


Logging in to your Google email account (Gmail):

1.) Type "http://www.google.com" in the address bar at the top of the web browser. Hit "enter" on your keyboard.

2.) At the Google search engine, left-click on the "Gmail" link in the upper center/left of the page.

3.) At the Google account log in page, type in your username and password. Hit enter on your keyboard.

4.) This will take you to your email "Inbox." This is where you receive your emails that people send you. Left-click on the name of one of the emails to open and read it!


At our "Inbox", there were a couple emailed assignments I had sent everyone in the class. The first was to reply to the email by left-clicking the "reply" button, then typing a brief message, and left-clicking "send." The second assignment was to visit the class blog, "Exploring The Web," and leave a comment. We finished that assignment in class, and then worked on our individual blogs.

I'll give you step by step instructions for logging in to your own blog with my next post!

ETW..Up Till Now!

Today was our first class day in October! We're already into our second month in the Exploring The Web class of the Fall 2009 semester! It was our second day of learning about creating a blog using a blog hosting service offered by Google (called Blogger).

We started our class asking very basic questions. What is the internet? How did it start? What is the web? What is a web browser? After discussing these questions, we began to learn about the web browser we're using for our class, Microsoft Internet Explorer (Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera are some others).

We also talked about different types of websites, including search engines (Yahoo!, Google, Bing, Ask, etc.), metasearch engines (Dogpile, Clusty, Mamma, Metacrawler, etc.), and ecommerce sites (ebay, craigslist, etc.).

Our last few classes have focused on free email accounts with Google (called Gmail), and creating our own blogs using Blogger. Before we started we talked about what email is (short for electronic mail), and what a blog is (short for weblog).

Email is a type of message transfer, used to send messages through the internet. Email is text heavy; you can send and recieve text messages and documents, and some images.

A blog is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual person, for commentary or news on a particular subject, or as a kind of personal online journal or diary. A blog is both text and image heavy; you can post messages, pictures, and other media on a blog.

This is the blog for our class, I hope you enjoy it, and continue to experiment with your own!
Until next time...