Qualifying for a Reflect blog
Although, technically a blogging platform can be used by anybody for anything, the Reflect blogging service is only for teaching, learning and assessment purposes. Hence, you may not use a Reflect blog as a space for commercial or corporate internal or external communications. However, it can be used to create blogs or web sites for UCL not-for-profit entities such as societies, clubs, Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Academic representatives groups, etc.
To request a blog that will be used in this way, or for service promotion please see UCL Corporate Blogs service. (Their service is available to UCL departments, research groups, centres and other bodies, although it is not a blogging service for personal usage).
Types of Reflect blog
In Reflect technically, there is really only one type of blog.
However, by activating a particular setting a blog becomes a Class blog. Other (non-Class) blogs can be joined to a Class blog. When a blog is joined to a Class blog then its own settings are mostly overridden by those of the Class blog. Hence, Teachers on a Class blog can access, as well as control the editing and privacy settings of the Students' blogs joined to it.
There are 3 ways in which a Reflect Class blog can be used with students:
- One blog for the entire class - Students can be added to (or enrolled on) the Class blog and allowed to post on it. (I.e. a Class blog that has one or more Teachers and Students contributing content).
- Each student has their own blog - which is joined to the Class blog. (I.e. Students just work on their own blog, not the Class blog).
- Each group of students has a blog - which is joined to the Class blog. (I.e. Students work on their group's blog, not the Class blog).
There are 2 ways in which a Reflect personal blog can be used:
- Individual blog - A UCL student or staff member has their own blog to work on.
- Group blog - A group of UCL students and/or staff members work on a single blog together.
At UCL a 'class' is usually equivalent to a module cohort, whereas a 'group' is usually a subset of it.
Users may have more than one blog of any type.
Blogs can be private, restricted to select people, or completely public.
Request a Reflect blog
To request a Reflect blog, for personal use please submit a MyServices form. To request more than one personal blog, follow this guidance to request a Class Blog that may either have many student contributors, or have student blogs attached to it.
Please note that once you have a blog, if you want to add other users to it you can add them manually or if you need to add a lot of users, e.g. adding students to a Class blog, then it may be best to use, or adapt the guidance given for requesting a Class Blog.
You can find out more about how to edit your blog and add users, etc. here in the Reflect - How to guides.