How Wordpress Can Help

1. How Wordpress Can Help

2. What is Wordpress? • Began as a blogging engine • Open Source • Extensible: through community coding, functionality expanded significantly. Now it has become a full Content Management System • Start students off simply, especially if what you’re teaching is not web development.

3. What Can Educators Use Wordpress For? • Simple way to quickly make a website. • Open web content up for comments that are more enduring and accessible than in Facebook (and, for secondary ed, less likely to be blocked) • Enable students to throw content into a wider context (it’s public) • Get them past the technical aspects of making a web site, so they can focus on their content.

4. How To Do It • First, you have to have enough computers and internet access. • Second, check that everyone has an email address of some kind (unless your school provides them) • Third, check if anyone has created a Wordpress blog before. • Wordpress.COM and Wordpress.ORG are different. ORG is more effort, but gives you more control – only for design or programming students. You want .COM

5. How To

6. It requests • Email address • Username • Password • Name for blog (http://yourname.wordpress.com) • It has helpful hints beside each. Probably 20% of your students will almost immediately forget either their username or password. • Depending on their age, you may want to pass a list around and get them all to write these three things on a list you then have. Or make sure they write it down themselves. • Not every name they’d like is available. They should be prepared to spend a little time with this part of the form. Names are important.

7. Have Another Activity To Turn To. The best thing is to do those first steps early in class. Then give it 15-20 minutes for the emails to get through, while you do something else. You DO want them to activate that same class, though – after 2 days without response, Wordpress gives up.

8. Once They’re Activated • Go back to wordpress.com and login. • It will try to distract you by getting you involved with other blogs. Have everybody click the “My Blog” tab at the top. • This is where the whole secret is: Don’t let the options overwhelm your students. Keep it simple. • There are 3 things you need to do to have a full site! • Choose a theme • Add some pages • Add one or more posts

9. First, Choose A Theme • Themes establish the look and feel of the site you are creating – basically a template. • There are thousands of free themes. Don’t get into the paid ones. Beginners can get lost in the variety of options: • Give them a 10 minute time limit or • Require them to use a theme you’ve chosen – the default (currently called “Twenty Eleven,” but can change any time, is always a safe choice). • If this gives anyone commitment-phobia, assure them they can change their theme any time.

10. Once You Have Your Theme • You have a site. There’s nothing on it yet, though. • This Dashboard has a lot of video tutorials, suggestions, etc. It’s all great. They can go back and explore as much as they want later. • Pages are the parts of the site you want to be constant. When you add a page, it will show up in your navigation throughout. • Posts are smaller chunks of information – usually used for news, updates, etc.

11. Pages

12. Editing Pages • Most Important Detail: NO AUTOSAVE. Publish, or perish.

13. Posts

14. Widgets

15. User Management

16. Users

17. Sum Up • They are always changing this stuff. Be ready to roll with it, and to update any handouts you have slightly each time. • If you get stuck: the biggest thing that sets Wordpress apart from other CMS systems is the helpfulness of the community. Go to http://wordpress.org/support and don’t be shy.