Before the course begins

1. Become familiar with blogging yourself
• Setup an RSS aggregator account or configure a custom portal for viewing RSS; Google Reader recommended
• Subscribe to several blogs in your aggregator
• Create a personal "sandbox blog" to play with and become familiar with the options of the blogging tool you've chosen
2. Consider what students will be required to do/post to their individual blogs as well as comments classmates blogs
3. Consider what optional activities students can engage in using their blog (e.g. sharing links to resources, off-topic discussions, etc.
4. Create a blog for yourself that will serve as the "class blog"
• Pick a theme that you like and stick with it
• Create categories for each "chunk" of your course, to match the "chunks" within the LMS (e.g. module1, module2, etc.)
• Create an About page where you post your contact information
• Customize the blog navigation to fit your needs. Consider adding blogroll, tag cloud, and categories. Use widgets to add this additional customization.
• Explore available plugins and add where additional features needed
• If you are going to use alternate communication means, such as Twitter, add links to those or perhaps embed latest tweets.
• If possible, enable your RSS feed to include the full text of posts and encourage students to do the same. This ensures that all new posts can be viewed from within an aggregator. Otherwise, post content may be truncated in the feed.
  
5. Make an initial post welcoming students to the course and congratulating them on finding your blog. Also consider including on your blog instructions for students on how to create their own blogs, subscribe, etc.