City Blogs is a service for staff and students to blog about learning, teaching and research activities at City. It runs on the CampusPress network which specialises in WordPress blogs for educational institutions.
A blog is a website where the content typically displays in reverse chronological order - i.e. newest entry on top. Most blogs encourage interactivity by enabling readers to leave comments and engage in a conversation with the author. Different themes will provide blogs with a different look and feel, but they tend to have a similar layout.
Staff and students can use blogs in a number of ways. Blogs can be requested to chart your own development or you might have your students use blogs to support their development or to contribute to a project as part of their modules.
Login to City Blogs (City username and password required). From My Sites select the blog you want to work on.
Module leaders decide what type of role students should have on class blogs. Student roles on the blog will either restrict or provide access to different elements of the blog. Module leader must provide students with information about how you are to interact with these blogs. There are three main types of blogs, detailed below.
There is a wealth of guidance from the CampusPress/Edublogs help and support pages.
These blogs are shared with tutors or lecturers. The blogs will be kept for two academic years. After this time, student blogs will be archived. Students are administrators and can post to the blog, edit posts, change the theme of the blog, comment on posts and reply to comments made on the blog
Please complete the CampusPress blog request form on IT Self Service Portal. Remember to add all the staff who require access to these blogs along with the role that they should have.
By default, all blogs are set with the privacy setting Only registered users of this blog are able to view it. The blog Administrator(s) can change this from the Dashboard. Click on the Settings menu and select Privacy. From this screen, the appropriate privacy setting can be selected and select Save changes.
For an individual student blog, which is not assessed, the student is typically the Administrator (can do everything including complete power over posts, pages, plugins, comments, choice of themes, imports, settings and assign user roles) and tutors are subscribers (can view posts and comments and add comments). For a full breakdown of the roles please see the Edublogs guidance on roles.
For an assessed blog, it is recommended to make students Editors (are able to publish posts/pages, manage posts/pages, upload files, moderate comments as well as manage other people’s posts/pages, but are not able to assign and remove user roles)
The Digital Education Team runs a programme of workshops on all our educational technologies and digital accessibility. The sessions are run both online and in-person throughout the year. View full details and sign up on the LEaD events calendar.
You can request one-to-one or group training on any of the University's educational technologies or digital accessibility via the IT Self Service Portal.
