This page provides information and handouts for faculty members who are or will be running blogs in their courses.
Registering Students for Your Blog
There are two ways that you can register students for your blog.
Creating Accounts for Your Students:
Though having students self-register has been effective in the past, some faculty members prefer to register students themselves. Here are the steps necessary to do this, which assume you are working from the administrative area of your course weblog.
- Click on the “Tools” menu on the left side of the screen, and then the “DDImportUsers” button beneath that
- Enter a username and the Baruch email address for each student you wish to import
- The username must be all small letters, and must be followed by a pipe symbol (which looks like this: |) and the student’s Baruch email address. Use the first initial of the student’s first name, followed by their last name
- Example: jstudent|joe.student@baruchmail.cuny.edu
- Select “User Role” (likely, “Author”) from the “Role for these users” drop down list
- Click “Import Users”
- Most of the accounts should process without a problem. You may however run into the following errors:
- “Results: Errors! Username already exists: jstudent|joe.student@baruchmail.cuny.edu”
- Try again, adding a “2” to the end of the username: jstudent2|joe.student@baruchmail.cuny.edu
- Or, “Results: Errors! Email address already in use: jstudent|joe.student@baruchmail.cuny.edu”
- This signifies that the user already has an account on the system, likely from another course. In order to add that student as a user on the blog, you’ll submit a request through the Contact page that includes your course blog url and the students-in-question’s email addresses.
- The students who have been registered for your course blog will receive an email from “WordPress” with their username, a password that has been generated for them, and the login link for your blog.
Having students self-register:
If you want your students to register and add themselves as subscribers, contributors, authors (most common), editors, or administrators, they’ll need to first create an account on Blogs@Baruch (if they don’t have one already), and then individually add themselves to your blog. You’ll need give your students this handout (a PDF file that you can alter if you’d like) and make sure that the “Add Yourself as A User” widget appears in the sidebar of your blog.
During this process, you have the choice to password protect self-registration on your blog, and to allow self-registrants to add themselves to your blog at any user level. Once your students have completed registration, you will see them listed in your Users menu.
The screencast below will walk you through setting up this process.
