Some teachers might use different spaces for your reflective work, but one common platform you’ll use for creating and managing your Reflective Journal is called Edblogs. Edblogs is an implementation of WordPress, which you may be familiar with if you’ve ever kept a book in the past. Edblogs offers you a great deal of freedom in designing, maintaining, and even sharing your Reflective Journal while you are a student at UM. What’s more, you can create additional Edblogs sites for future classes and keep them all until you graduate from UM.
This section will help you get started with the Edblogs platform so you’re ready to start reflecting during the first week of class.
Signing In and Creating your Reflective Journal
Edblogs uses the same username and password as MyOleMiss, so you don’t need to remember an addition account. To get started, visit edblogs.olemiss.edu. The Edblogs landing page has plenty of help resources for students and teachers, but you’ll primarily use it to sign in to your Reflective Journal. Go ahead and click the big “Sign In” button when you’re ready to get started.
When you see the standard UM login splash screen, go ahead and enter your MyOleMiss username and password and click “Sign In.”
Your Reflective Journal may have been generated in advance if your teacher chose to use a Class Blog. If your site has been created for you, you can skip the rest of this section.
If your Reflective Journal was not generated in advance, click the Create Site tab on the administrative toolbar.
Use the interactive hotspot activity below to learn about the different configuration options you have when you create your Reflective Journal for the first time.
Creating a new Reflective Journal
Once your site is created, you need to add your teacher as a subscriber. From the left-side menu of your site’s dashboard, click “Users.” Enter your teacher’s username in the field. (If your teacher is Dr. Karla Lyles, you would enter “kmlyles.” Your teacher will give you the correct username in class). Click “Add Existing User.” (Note: If your teacher is using a Class Blog, please ignore this step).
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Creating Posts in your Reflective Journal
You can always return to edblogs.olemiss.edu when you need to access your Reflective Journal. When you sign in, make sure you are viewing the dashboard for the correct site. You can switch between your different sites by hovering over the “My Sites” tab from the administrative toolbar. Select the site name for your Reflective Journal.
Once you’re on your site’s dashboard, you can click the 
icon to create a new post. Then, you can use the WordPress editor to write your reflection or other type of content. Before you submit your post, make sure to put it in the correct category. The default categories for Reflective Journals are Daily Writes, Weekly Writes, and Unit Reflections. You can add new categories by clicking “+New Category.”
You’ll learn more about the categories and the different types of reflection you’ll write in the next section. If you want to learn more about all the things you can do with Edblogs, visit the user guide.
