Dear Gibsters,

On this page you will find some useful tips for writing and editing your blog entries.

How to write a good blog entry: check out this page for great tips

Finding good pictures: Your blog entry will look more attractive if you add a fitting picture. Make sure your picture is clearly connected to your topic.

Remember, all pictures on our blog must be FREE of any copyright restrictions. Use your own pictures whenever possible, this will add a personal touch to your blog. If you cannot produce a personal picture go to pixabay.com to find free pictures. Do not limit your search term too much — otherwise you won’t find any pictures. Example: You won’t find pics of the “Graz Giants” there, but you will certainly find a suitable picture if you enter “American football”.

If you cannot find any suitable pictures on pixabay, try finding another creative commons picture. CC stands for Creative Commons, the little man in the circle tells you that you have to give the source of your picture (name and or link where you found it).

 

 

 

Finding free music: If you are creating a video entry and need some background music, make sure you do the same for music. You must use free music. Keep in mind that music might distract your viewers from your message.

A few editing tips: Your blog will look best if you set a “featured image”. Upload a suitable image in LANDSCAPE format. (Add Media). Then click “set featured image” at the bottom of the right-hand column. You can include other pictures as well, but the featured image will appear on top.

Keep the text formatting simple. Use boldface or colors sparingly. Just paste in your text from word.

Format: For regular blogs with text and a few pictues choose “standard” format in the column on the right. This is our default setting. For videos you will have to change this setting to “video”. If you just want to post a quick tip or an interesting link, try the “Aside” format. Your entry will then appear in the right-hand column of our blog.

Quoting your sources: For most of your entries you will have used some sources. Quote your sources — do not plagiarize!!! The easiest way to do this is to use footnotes in word and paste the whole text into our blog. Fortunately the footnotes will still be included.

Comments: Use the comments function to  share your views on other students’ posts.  Comments are more  than just saying “cool post”.

• Good comments will help us to reflect some more about the topics of our entries.
• Good comments will add futher ideas that we might not have thought about.
• Good comments will encourage us to keep searing and exploring.
• Good comments will point out misunderstandings or mistakes in our thinking.
• Good comments are at least 50 words long — ideally they will be 100 to 150 words long and really add new ideas to the original post.

If you have any other questions, let me know.

Pö