Using WordPress for a class blog is very common amongst First Year Seminar (FYS) and Values in Science and Technology (VaST) classes at Lafayette College. In the past, students have been given a semester long assignment related to a particular topic, where they are asked to create posts and comment on each others’ work throughout the class.
Professor Tara Gilligan used this approach with her FYS183 class in Fall 2010. The class, titled “A Sense of Place: Gender, Environmentalism, and the First-Year Experience”, required each student to select a topic that connects to some aspect of the term “place.” Students then created 5 posts about their topic and were required to post comments on their classmates’ entries.
When working with classes on WordPress projects, Instructional Technology typically holds a 30-45 minute workshop to outline the basic functionality of this tool, and demonstrate how various types of media can be incorporated in WordPress. For Tara Gilligan’s FYS class, I outlined the following:
- Create a new post
- Format text
- Add media to a post (video/photos/URLs)
- Categorizing and tagging posts
- Publishing options (saving a draft, previewing, publishing, editing)
- Commenting
- Searching for posts (by author, category or tags)
To learn more about this project, visit the class site at: http://sites.lafayette.edu/fys183-fa10/. You’ll need a valid Lafayette Network ID and Password to log in.