For my cs100 Service Learning term project, I had the opportunity to help one of my former high school teacher set up a blog. She is retiring and traveling to Japan, so she wanted a way to share her experiences with friends and family. She has been faithfully reading my blog that I set up to share my college experiences, so she decided I would be the perfect teacher to help her set one up. Here is a mini photo tour of the process.
First off, I arrived at school around fifteen minutes early to set up. The high school doesn't have wireless (something I've really taken for granted at Haverford) and I wanted to figure out a way we could go through the process together, each on our own laptops, side by side. This way, I could teach her through spoken and demonstrated instruction. Also, I could more easily take screen shots of the process and save them directly to my computer. I found an extra ethernet cable so that we could both hook up our computers at the same time, but unfortunately, the connection wasn't strong enough to support both of us. So we used her laptop--I instructed, but she did almost all of the work herself.
The Process
To start, we first had to set up a google account for Blogger, a blogging platform run by Google. In the process we found out that she already had a google account (she has multiple email addresses, but doesn't use all of them). We had the password sent to her main email address, and logged in to Blogger.
One of the first things we were prompted to do was name the blog. This is a necessary initial step because the name is also a portion of the web address (blogname.blogspot.com). I had asked her to think of a name in advance so that we could get started more quickly. The blog is called "A Quiet Sojourn".
With that logistic out of the way, we were able to get started customizing the aesthetics of the blog. We first looked through all of the templates, and she decided she liked the "Simple" template the best. This is also the template I use. There are a few versions of this template (each has a different font and slight twist on the stylings of the page), and she also chose the same version as mine.
Little did I know, this version of the "Simple" template could be customized with a variety of background images that Google allows you to choose from. I have always kept the default image (the books on the bookshelves you see in my background) because I liked it, but also because I didn't know I had more choices. You can even upload your own photograph or image for the background, which is what she decided to do.
This is where we chose her photo and picked template colors to match. Click on the image to see it in full size.
The bad think about uploading your own image is that it automatically tiles it for you, and we didn't like the tiled look. You can also set the alignment of the image, but then it fills in the rest with a background color and it doesn't look very nice. Since I had never used my own image in this way, I had never run into such a problem. I'm sure there is a way that it can be rectified, but we ended up leaving it at being aligned in the upper left corner (you'll see the final product in the last image).
But stylizing your blog is not the only piece of blogging--you have to know how to use the platform so you can actually produce posts. Here is an image of the Blogger dashboard which I showed her how to navigate.
Most importantly, I showed her how to create a post. It's pretty simple--click the pencil button in the top left corner of the dashboard, and start typing! But there are also some pretty cool features in Blogger posting, like easily uploading images and resizing them within the post, a feature for linking to other webpages or posts, adding videos, scheduling a specific time for the post to be published in the future, and more. But one feature I had never used before, the "Location" feature, allows you to set your current location through Google Maps. In your post, a text link to a map of your location is included. This will be particularly relevant to my teacher's experience as she will be traveling in Japan!
Here is a photo of her creating a test post. As you can see, she learned how to incorperate images and text links, and set her location to Tokyo, Japan.
Finally, here is a photo of what the blog looked like when we finished our session. It's not perfect, but she does have a good sense of how to use the program.
Reflection
The process of this project confirmed something that we have discussed often throughout the World of Computing course which is this: computing is all about trial and error. In lab zero, I had to experiment with different ways of getting my signature onto the computer into an appropriate file size. In lab one, writing HTML/CSS code that the computer could read was all about trial and error--one flaw could throw off the whole webpage. In addition, I was constantly revising my code to make the website look more professional. In Scratch, sometimes I think my input will result in something different from what the computer's output provides, and I have to go back and rethink my input. Using a blog also requires tedious revisions of input--but it's also just the nature of using computers in general.
This experience of trial and error, though sometimes frustrating, is how I learn to use my computer so that it performs more efficiently in the way that works best for me. Just through this process of teaching someone else about using Blogger, I learned about two features of the program that I had not yet experienced--choosing your own background image and setting a location. The more I explore the functions of my machine, the more work it can do for me. That's the beauty of the experience of exploring and trial and error in computing.
To view the blog, A Quiet Sojourn, click here. Though not in full use yet, it will be this summer during the author's visit to Japan!
Nicely done and documented -- JD
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