Storing your resources on a teaching blog
Why use a blog?
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If you teach across lots of courses and at different levels, having all your resources in one place can save you duplicating things as blogs have a 'label' system. All students need is one web address and to be shown how to use the labels. There may be some resources you have that are applicable to more than one course or class so you can direct all relevant students to it in one go.
I teach all 5 groups in the music department, tutor two of them and teach quite a range of subjects within the courses. I found managing 5 different courses on Moodle quite time consuming and I didn't want to restrict L2 students from seeing L3 resources necessarily so I just have one blog:
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http://www.wkcchloeherington.blogspot.co.uk
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I've been using it for about 5 years so there is A LOT of stuff on there but I simply 'hide' posts at the start of each academic year and then 're-publish' them as and when I need them, replacing examples with more up to date ones where needed. It also serves as a SOL to some extent as I do the blog posts in order of teaching.
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Having everything online also means that parents can see exactly what their offspring are doing in classes and be very clear about what we expect of students.
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How does it work for students?
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If a L2 student wants to see every single post that is time at them, they click the 'L2 Music' label on the right. This will bring up every post for every L2 class that I have published as well as any extra things such as interesting websites, articles or resources that might be relevant to all students but not course or class specific.
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If they just want to see posts relating to their Film Music Project then they click on that label; if they develop a sudden interest in copyright then they can click on the label for that and see what I've been doing with the L3 2nd years; if they want to have a look at what the L3 first years are doing for their decades project to get an idea of what that course might be like, they can see it too.
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The course guides for my tutor groups are also on there as a page that can be accessed from the top bar which saves time (most of the generic information for courses is the same so you can copy & paste) and they can always access it.
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How do you set one up?
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Both WordPress and Blogger are good for making blogs. Our department use blogger simply because we embed so much video and the login for YouTube and blogger are the same as they are from Google.
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To set up a blogger blog, you will need a gmail account. You can use your private gmail account to save remembering a zillion passwords or create a department one - each teacher can set up their own blog on the same account and you can then keep a common YouTube channel and GoogleDrive if you want them. There will be posts on how to use them as soon as we have time to make them!
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The student guide can be found HERE - I will create a more detailed guide for teachers shortly but am more than happy to come and help you set one up.
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How to use labels
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This depends on how your course works and how many classes you teach. If you teach BTEC, then you might find it useful to label by unit. If you teach UAL then maybe project and class. For A Level, it could be by topic. Just whatever makes it simple. If you only teach one class group then you don't even need to use course labels.
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NB: when you set up your blog and look at the layout, you will need to add the 'labels' gadget. You will only see the labels once you have added some so don't panic if it looks blank to start with!
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