Your individual blog is where you will type your response to the prompt I post on the course blog.
You’ll want to add the tag: comm326 as well as any subject tags appropriate to your post. You can use the tags of the course blog prompt for suggestions, such as Marxism, movies, and so on, but I encourage you to come up with your own, too. To add a tag type it into the “Post Tags” bubble on the right side of the “Add New Post” menu. You’ll need to click the “Add” bubble.
Also, please add the appropriate category, either: My Pop Culture Essay, Blog Assignment, or whichever category I specifically ask you to use in the course blog prompt. To do so, click the “+Add New Category” button on the right of the dashboard, type the category you want to use then click “Add.” If you’re using a category again it should appear in the category menu for you to just check the box.
If you are ready to publish be sure that visibility is set to public then click the blue “Publish” button on the right. The “Publish” menu in the add new post dashboard is helpful if you want to set a specific time for publishing and/or keep your posts invisible to the public while you edit. However, for me to grade your posts you need to be sure that by deadline you’ve made them all public!
Since you’re being graded on the originality of your posts, especially your group projects, please be sure to practice adding video, images and embedding other media, as well as simple links (Note: the link included here references how to add sidebar links to your homepage but I still thought it might be helpful) to topics you reference. Use the toolbar above the text box in the post dashboard. There are buttons for most major types of audio/visual embeds. Click on the button you need and play around to get familiar with the technology. To add images or audio from your own computer, you can use the “Add Media” or “Upload/Insert” buttons. It ‘s very similar to uploading photos to Facebook, so you should have no excuse to not grasp the technology after a couple of tries.
To add links, highlight the text you want to use as the link prompt in your text box then click the chain link icon above the text box. In the pop-up window, paste in the URL of the website you want to link to. In the “Target” menu of the pop-up, please check the box next to “Open link in new window” so that we don’t navigate away from your post by clicking on the link. Finally, click “Insert.” Practice embedding links this way to make sure it works properly by the time I’m grading your posts. If you’d like more guidance, here is a helpful link on how to embed media on your WordPress blogs.
Also, on your first post attempt, scroll down the dashboard to be sure it’s set to send the post to Twitter and that you have discussion/comments enabled. If not, you’ll want to correct that from your settings menu so that you don’t have to manually click these for each post. After you publish, you can still edit the post if you see broken links or typos. However, all edits need to be complete by deadline since that’s when I’ll be grading posts.
Danielle Stern