What makes a good blog?

"Simplified Blogging" © John Atkinson

used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Now that you've completed your first blog post, maybe you're wondering if you did it right.  If you're new to a topic or an idea, it's hard to know if you understand it unless you have something to compare it to.

Activity #1: 

Can you find examples of other good bloggers? How about other music tech bloggers? What common elements to do find in good blogs?  Search Blogger by clicking on the "Next Blog" link at the top of the page.  Search Google for "Top 25 Blogs" or "Music Technology Blogs" or "Best Blogs" and comb through the results

Let's make a list of good blogs and what makes a good blog:

What makes a good blog?

1. Pictures (and explanations) and video
2. Good stories
3. It has a unified theme
4. Sitemeter or other cool things
5. Links

What are some examples of good blogs?  Why are they good examples?

1. 13th Annual Weblog Awards: The 2013 Bloggies (Reb Clark-incredible design)
2. 101 Cookbooks (Lydia Thiesfeldt-interesting content)
3. Taco Hooked Up Sportfishing (Carter Vande Slunt-interesting content)
4. Wrong Hands (Mr. Witte-engaging design and content)
5. sdlfkj

Activity #2:

How should our Music Tech blogs be evaluated if they are "good" or not?  Click through the following links to other school's blog rubrics and identify elements of each rubric that you think apply to our Music Tech blogs for this class.

1. UW-Stout: A Rubric for Evaluating Student Blogs
2. Tim Horgan: Blogging Rubric
3. Bloom's Digital Taxonomy: Blog Journalling Rubric
4. Peter Rawsthorne: EDU3484 Blog Assignment Rubric

Elements of these rubrics which apply to our Music Tech blogs:

1. UW-Stout: Content, Quality of Writing, Graphics and Multimedia
2. Tim Horgan: Ideas & Content, Writing Quality, Use of Enhancements (Community?)
3. Bloom's: Blogging - Yes, Understanding - Maybe, Timeliness - No
4. dfgdgf
5. sdsdf

The first music tech project of the year is a selfish one!

Audacity Logo

The first project of the year in Music Tech is always a unit on digital audio editing.  The reason I make this the first project of the year, is that in the past, WLA students have come to me asking for my help cutting music for dance and cheerleading routines, helping them make medleys for homecoming lip syncs, and other such requests.  What better skills to teach my students than real-world cutting of digital audio using modern software?  When my students know how to "cut" audio, they take the pressure off me and can help do audio editing work for any other student in school.  It's a win-win!

We used Audacity, a free, open source, cross platform, digital audio workstation, to accomplish this task.  You can read about the lesson on the Dance Project 1 instructions (PDF). This first project was entirely teacher-directed.  Future projects will give the students more choice over the music used and the decisions about what sections of the music to use.  My basic goal for this first project was to get rid of most of the verses and lyrics, while still retaining the feel of the beginning, middle, and end of the pieces.  In all, the original was 1:45 long.  The edited version below is 39 seconds long.

How do you share music? First we tried linking to our Google Drive accounts. Here is my Dance Project 1 MP3 file on Google Drive.  Sometimes it is a challenge to link MP3 files on a blog because there isn't a native app to play the MP3 file.Yes, we can upload it to out Google Drive and it plays there when we click on it in preview mode, but linking to the MP3 file only allows us to download it, not play it in the browser.

Enter SoundCloud (not Enter Sandman, that's something totally different).  According to their "About Us" page, "SoundCloud is the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere." What that means for our Music Tech class is a way to upload and share up to two hours of music for free!  It's pretty easy: (1) Sign up for a free account, (2) upload a song, (3) copy the embed code (it starts out <iframe...) for your song, and (4) paste the embed code into the HTML side of your blogging platform.  Then is shows up like this:



I like SoundCloud because it's visually pleasing, allows easy sharing to most major social media, and it's free for the first two hours of uploads.

One final mystery we try to address in the first Dance Project is the topic of audio file formats.  Most people today have heard of MP3 files because of the ubiquitousness of iPods and iPhones, but what other audio file formats might students also come across these days?  We took a cursory look at three different audio file formats: WAV, AIF, and MP3 and made Google Slide presentations.  Mine is embedded below, but please check out my student's presentation and blog posts.  You'll find their names in the upper right column of this blog.  They did a great job on their first Google Slide presentations!