Instructions to Students

by Professor Andrea White

Your short explanation can go here. To make it bold but smaller like this one, select it, then select "Minor heading" from the drop-down menu at the top. My name above is a "Subheading."

You will turn one of your assignments into a blog post that will be shared with the class and possibly be made public. In the past, students in Ed Psyc have expressed an interest in sharing their self-directed learning projects with others. This assignment provides a mechanism to do so, should you want to share your project. However, any assignment that you complete for this class can be turned into a blog post. The class blog should be a showcase of the best work of the class.

I suggest you print these instructions. Flipping tabs and getting the formatting correct will be a challenge.

Posts will

• have a descriptive title, author, and short explanation at the top 
• Put your title up at the top, in the box to the right of where it says "Post" in orange.
• The descriptive title should be that: It should briefly name/describe the theme, theory or concept in your piece. Using "teaching philosophy" as a part of your title is fine, but you need a couple more words to narrow it. Entice your readers to read on...
• The author should be your first line of text.
• First Last, major, 'year
• Andrea White, Psychology & International Studies, '92
• Put a short explanation & why you chose this assignment to share (2-3 sentences) at the top. This will help contextualize your piece.
• be at least 750 words. Maximum should be ~1,500, but you may go over. 
• include at least 4 hyperlinks to relevant pages or articles
• you should strive to have these hyperlinks within the text, rather than a stand-alone citation
• have at least 2 illustrative pictures or figures, with the source indicated 
• have appropriate labels (aka tags, but don't use #hashtags. Blogger is not a pound-sign delimited environment). To add a label while you are in editing mode, look to the upper right under Post settings. Existing labels can be selected, or you can create new ones. DO NOT make a new label if one already exists that you can use. You should have at least 4 labels, as follows:
1. 1 assignment label: Teaching Philosophy, Motivation Project, Self-Directed Learning Project. Add other labels if needed (e.g., if you use a reading reaction, then make a new label to identify it). 
2. at least 1 audience label, e.g., teachers, students, parents. You can add new labels to refine these further. 
3. 2-3 course topic labels. These should be the primary topic of your paper, a major theorist/theory that you use, educational psychology concepts that you give a lot of attention to...
4. Do not use TOO many course topic labels. Be selective in the ones that you choose, that they are the MAIN topic(s) of your writing. Don't use vague ones, like "education" or "school". Duh, everyone's blog is about education or schools. 
• be in Helvetica or Trebuchet font, normal font size 
• while you are editing your blog post, select COMPOSE (upper left), then 
• SELECT ALL, then 
• Select Helvetica or Trebuchet from the pull-down menu under font (the fancy F at the top) 
• Select Normal from the pull-down menu under text size (the double-T next to the fancy F) 
• be legible
• Check the Preview (upper right when you are editing) and check to be sure it is legible.
• be free of formatting mistakes
• Check the Preview, look for weird formatting, and correct all formatting mistakes. 
• Despite you following all the instructions in this post, there WILL be weird formatting things that occur. Fix them.