How to: Blog Post

While specific assignment descriptions are included on Learning Suite, there are a few critical elements to blogging that will affect how your projects are graded in terms of professionalism and aesthetic appeal.

Introductory Content

Because many academic blog posts tend to go on longer than the length of one screen, using a "jump break" is crucial to both readers and writers in terms of getting a better sampling of the blog as a whole. You have likely seen where blog posts begin with a couple of paragraphs, then there is a "read more" message that you have to click in order to see the remainder of the post. Use the "jump break" to separate the capsule/teaser content from the rest of the post (see this tutorial). It makes the whole blog experience much simpler because it allows readers to scroll through the blog and see lots of posts, each with their own post title. Of course, this also requires you to create a 1-2 sentence introduction/teaser, after which you will insert the "jump break."

Media Usage

Both of the assignments that you have been asked to complete on the blog require that you include media such as videos or images. After finishing writing each post, you have to check to make sure that the picture/video looks right and functions properly.
Images:
Insert images directly from your computer rather than copy/pasting from the internet. This affects the size and quality of the picture (sometimes it won't show up at all if copy/pasted). Do this by selecting the "insert image" button (it looks like a little picture) on the top navigation bar of blogger. Make sure the image is appropriately sized and positioned within the post. Never go over 400 pixels wide. Always provide attributions (cite where you found the content) and include a brief caption (less than a sentence).
Videos:
To include videos in your post, you have to first upload them to YouTube as "unlisted." This must be done in order to show up properly on our blog. If you set it to "private," then the professor, teaching assistants, and other students will be unable to view the video at all. By making your video "unlisted," it will be public enough to function with the blog, but search engines will not be able to find it. However, you can also set your video's settings to "public" if you so desire.
Once the accessibility settings are correct, you can upload the video directly to the blog by creating your new post and using the cinema clapboard on the top navigation bar of blogger to insert your video into the post.

Labels

Like the "jump break" we talked about, labels are also crucial to readers' navigation of the blog. Labels are very similar to #hashtags used to navigate social media in that everything with the same label can be grouped together. However, just like with hashtags, label functionality is affected by punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. Because of this, only capitalize Names when using labels and don't use any punctuation. For example, on your assignments you should include a label such as "posted by Johnny Appleseed," but insert your own name. For the digital museum assingment, you should include the label "digital museum," and for the digital story assignment you should include the label "digital story."

To use labels, look at the "Post Settings" on the righthand side of the browser when composing a new post. Click on the sub-point "labels," then type in the labels for your post and separate each label with a comma. We also want to encourage you to include your own labels that you come up with about different aspects of your assignment. For example, on the digital story assignment you could include labels for the social movement you chose or the name of the woman you focused on.