A blog is a personal online journal that is frequently updated and intended to share with others. Most blogs also have a commenting feature so that people can respond to one another's thoughts. Blogs encourage students to express their ideas clearly. Blogs also address the need to expand various aspects of social learning. From the instructor's point of view, blogs are an effective means of gaining insight into students' activities and provide a way to share the knowledge and materials collected.

In Blackboard Learn, instructors create and manage blogs, and only enrolled users can view and create entries and comments in them. Similar to journals, you can use blogs for a graded assignment or gather opinions and information without assigning a grade.

Types of Blogs

Blogs consist of two elements:

• Blog Entries: Text, images, links, multimedia, social media, and attachments added by course members.
• Comments: Remarks or responses to blog entries made by other course members, including the instructor.

You can allow students to participate in blogs in three ways:

• Course blogs: You can create a course blog and choose the topic. All course members can add blog entries and comment on blog entries.
• Individual blogs: Students can add entries only to their own blogs. All other course members can view and add comments to it.
• Group blogs: If you enable the blogs tool for a group of users, they can perform these tasks:
  • Group members can add blog entries and make comments on blog entries, building upon one another.
  • All course members can view group blogs, but non-group members can only add comments.

You have full control over all blogs in your course. You can edit and delete entries in any of the blog types. You can also delete user comments.