If you are not familiar with the WordPress blogging environment, now is the time to look at the tutorials and other WordPress Getting Stared information that has been provided for you. Searching in YouTube will also get you to more WordPress How-to videos if you need more help. A good collection of WordPress tutorials and resources can be found on the WordPress Basics page.
Please note that we are currently using WordPress version 3.5. There may be tutorials on YouTube or other places that feature version 2. Most instructions for version 2 will work in your blog but some of the ‘shortcuts’ might be different.
One of the first things you will want to do is go to the administration or dashboard page of your blog and pick a theme the suites you from the Appearance menu. You should also look at the other settings, especially the Discussion settings. What you do with the Discussion settings will have a big impact on your experience with the course. If you allow no comments, then your interaction with others is going to be limited severely. You can also choose to allow only members of this site to comment, or leave it wide open for anyone to comment. You might want to start slowly with this and see how it goes. If you are allowing comments at all, then it is a good idea ti minimally require that a comment author have a previously approved comment. Comments on blogs are a notorious source for spam attacks. You will have to be diligent in checking comments for spam if you are allowing comments, pingbacks and trackbacks. If you are getting a lot of spam, then you should ask your instructor about others ways of blocking spam such as using the Akismet plugin. Also, check out these tips from Edublogs.