Every semester, I have at least one section of an Introduction to Computers class. For the past year or so, I have added blogging to the curriculum as a way of giving students a real-world connection to Internet use as well as, I hope, an integrative motivation tool. This semester we are using Blogger (instead of Movable Type on our private site) as the tool of choice–I figure that’ll be the tool of choice if they decide to blog personally, in any case.

One question I usually ask, to demonstrate to the classes how any person’s blog can reach a wide number of people, is how many visitors per day they think my blog draws in. The first student I asked said “three.” Okay. So I asked a second student what she thought. She looked up in thought, then counted on her fingers a bit, and finally replied, “ten thousand.”

Needless to say, the actual number is somewhere in between….

This post was first generated in-class–originally much shorter due to time constraints–to demonstrate what a fully-equipped blog could do (complete with a demo of Ecto). Below is the photo of this semester’s class (a small one, Spring is always light) taken so I could show everyone how to take an image from digital camera to blog site.