Enabling students to administer the blogsite

Giving students some admin rights gives them ownership of the blog tool AND gives you a break from constantly updating!

When you add USERS to the blogsite, you can choose the degree of control they will have over the blog:

1. Administrator– total control, including the ability to remove other Administrators
2. Editor– slightly limited, but still powerful
3. Author– can write and edit posts
4. Contributor– can edit

For more detailed info, see FAQs: Different users’ Roles which includes this helpful advice:

Be careful what roles you give people, especially if you want them to be an Editor or joint Administrator – Editors can delete content, and Administrators can remove users, including you. Promoting someone is easy – removing a role is much harder.

I would love to hear what others think about this. It is all a bit experiment at this point. I am working with student USERS on the following blogs:

Waimea Senior Music – students are full administrators and can add other users. Means I need to keep an eye on content, but haven’t had any trouble yet. I add quite a few posts to this site to pass on notices to the kids.

Camerata Choir– students are full adminstrators, and they also conduct this choir. The condition is that I remain an administrator. Again, no probs. I try not to add anything to this and just watch over it

Posts & pages—what’s the difference?!

Learn how to Add & Edit a Post on your blog . . .

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A post is a topic of conversation which usually appears on the front page of your blog. Readers then add comments about that post—you’ll end up with a string of comments on that topic. When a new topic arises, its time for a new post—but readers can still comment on any post. Remember “blog” comes from “web log”—so a blog is basically an online journal for everyone to read.

Have a look at Waimea Senior Music , a student-administered site, to see the latest conversation piece there–a slideshow farewell from one of our international students

A page is something that you want to keep static on your blog. For example, WordPress automatically gives you an “About” page, assuming that you want to tell others about you or your group. Other pages might be a “Contact” page if you are looking to be found or a “Resources” page if you want to add things that your kids will refer to often.

Have a look at the Belle a Cappella Videos and mp3s page as an example.

Readers may be able to comment on pages if you choose to give them that option. Learn how to do this under Add & Password-Protect a Page

Hey, I’ve got a question for Chris…

How secure is all this? Who can get access?
If I set up a page for my seniors how do i make sure only they have access?
Can I password some things?

Changing the look of your blog

If you haven’t worked it out for yourself yet, here are some step by step instructions on Howto: Change the look of your blog.

You will learn to:

• Change the theme– choose from a large number of preset themes that can totally change the feel of your blog
• Add a header picture– choose one of your own pictures to remain at the top of your blog at all times
• Work with widgets– your list of links is a widget, as is your calendar and you list of pages. These can all be moved around on the side of your page, or swapped for other more interesting widgets!

There are many different types of widgets. To learn more about what they do, visit the FAQ page at WordPress.com

Add a link to your blog

I’D BE HAPPY TO WALK YOU THROUGH IT!– i’ve just discovered how to use WINK software to create tutorials. Check out “Howto: add links” to go through a step by step tutorial– more of these to come!

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Great to see people starting to play with this site. Please continue to add links to your blogs– whether blog-in-progress or blog-of-the-century let’s see it.

Once you are an administrator, you can add a link:

1. Go to the DASHBOARD
2. choose BLOGROLL
3. click ADD LINKS
4. add the NAME (what will appear on the site), the URL (copy this from the top of your blog page) and a DESCRIPTION (what appears when your mouse goes over the link
5. be sure to add your link to the correct CATEGORY– create a category if you don’t want it to appear under “Sample Blogs”

Blogging in the Arts– a site for you to play with

I’ve registered this blog as a site to play with if you don’t want to create (or mess up) your own blogsite. Consider this our test site where anyone and everyone with a WordPress username can design, change and update the site.

Please remember that we can easily erase each others’ work! So, if something is important to you, its best to back it up somewhere else as well.

Before you can make any changes, you need to be added as an administrator for the site:

1. Go to WordPress.com and get a username– you can choose to get a blog, or just a username and add a blog later
2. Email any administrator– administrators will just enter your email on the user page, no need to give up your password or username!
3. Now you’re an adminstrator and you can add new administrators

Now have it! Please do whatever you like– change the theme, add a picture for the header (or replace someone else’s), add pages, add a post, add links to useful websites . . .

Hello all

Even with permission to mess with the webpage I am definately feeling the pressure not to trash it or hit the delete key at the wrong time.

I am not an expert blogger and to be honest find computers to be necessary worktools but am hopeful that I can commandeer this techinical beast for some good drama chatter so any and all help will be gratefully recieved…Ta Claire