Introduction

For some time now I have been using my faculty webpage as a means to deliver some supplemental information to students. This practice has an effective way for me to make relatively "static" things like the course syllabus, list of homework exercises, and exam reviews available to students. Thus, if a student forgot to write down the homework assignment at the end of class, they could go to my webpage and check what it was. If a syllabus was misplaced, they could print out another, etc.

Unfortunately, a standard webpage is not a very good platform for small packets of inforation that I might like to pass on that might be time sensitive. For example, I might want to let my Calculus class know that problem 35 should be tackled using the Pythagorean theorem rather than a Trig function. This is something I might mention when assigning the exercises, but was never something I would post to my webpage. The reason was this information was relatively specialized. An important detail, but not really "big picture". If I had more tips to add for a later problem set, one option would be overwriting the old ones. This would be bad if a student was a little behind, and would seem to defeat the purpose of posting it to begin with. If I didn't delete older entries, I would end up with a big page full of these disconnected bits, which would be cumbersome to search through. A blog is a great solution for this. The pages are easy to update, older posts are put away, but they can be retrieved easily. Further, entries can be searched through by date, or by topic.