ECMP 355 - Final Project Ep. 4 (Artists That Students Can Learn From Podcast)

Ep._4_(June_19).m4a Listen on Posterous

Here is episode 4 of my podcast
Track List:

1. Adele - To Make You Feel My Love
2. Michael Franti & Spearhead - Hey Hey Hey
3. Elton John - Bennie & the Jets
4. Esperanza Spalding - Wild is the Wind
5. Jason Mraz - The Dynamo of Volition
6. Broken Social Scene - Meet Me in the Basement
7. Ray Charles - Georgia on my Mind

I am done podcasting for this week anyways, like I said I have lots of other ideas for podcasts, and I intend to continue!

My next thing to do is to buy my domain and to publish my website that I have been working on using iWeb. I'll keep you posted when I do! I plan to use that site to blog from, as well as post podcasts. iWeb has an awesome page you can add to your site to publish podcasts, as well as videos.

Thanks for an awesome semester everyone!

My Final Reflection

 

Here is my final reflection for ECMP 355. Writing the song for this video and recording it was the easy part. Uploading it was more challenging. Apparently one cannot upload a video to a "page" on Blogger, I could only upload it to a post. Not that it matters! As long as it can be seen. 

Enjoy!

ECMP 355 - Final Project Ep. 3 (The Easy Guitar Songs That Don't Suck Podcast)

Ep._3_(June_15).m4a Listen on Posterous

Here is another podcast!

I am now, as we speak, on to doing my reflection. iMovie is loaded and ready to rock!

Hopefully this podcast isn't too jumbled, I felt slightly rushed recording it, but oh well!

Track List:

1. Kina Grannis - Valentine
2. Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon
3. Taylor Swift - Love Story
4. Sufjan Stevens - That Was The Worst Christmas Ever!
5. Feist - I Feel It All
6. Neil Young - Heart of Gold
7. Shania Twain - No One Needs To Know

Enjoy!

ECMP 355 - Final Project Ep. 2 (The Kid-Friendly Podcast)

Podcast_Ep._2_(June_14).m4a Listen on Posterous

Here is the second podcast for ECMP 355. It has been a long afternoon, people. My iTunes is giving me so much grief. Whenever I open iTunes, this message comes up saying it's connecting to the store, but it never goes away and always come up even after the store is loaded. It keeps stopping anything from loading! GAH! So trying to purchase two songs for this podcast was like pulling teeth. It was a battle of wits between me and iTunes.

And I won.

HA!

Please note that the last 2 minutes are silence! Sorry! After my voice ends that is the end of the cast.

I'm gonna post the track list on Posterous now for these first 2 podcasts right now!

Thanks for listening!

Reflections on last night's class

So last night's class left me feeling super inspired about creating more of an online identity for myself. I realized that I do want to be "found" online. I want good things to come up when my name is searched on Google.

When Dean talked about buying a domain, I thought, "oh, I am gonna do that." And I am. I'm going to buy and create my own website.

So after class, I drove to my boyfriend's house. It was his birthday yesterday and we went out just to do something on the actual day, because frankly, birthday's are destined to not be very much fun if they are on a Monday. I should know, mine was as well this year. I had a class until 10pm.

Anyways, so I was telling Richie about what we had gone over in class, and how I wanted to start my own website, and he informed me that my Macbook comes with a program called iWeb. He suggested that I create my website using iWeb first and then create my domain so that I can just import it and it will be started at least.

Well let me say, I have only been using the program for about 2 minutes and I already love it. The program opens with a basic tutorial video, and it is easy to follow. So I am going to begin designing my very own webpage and hopefully I'll have it posted before class is officially over. I'd love for y'all to see it! I'm pretty pumped, I am feeling very prepared and able to do this, which I would not have felt before. I feel like I am capable to doing these things now.

Now, I realize that there are still things that are more pressing in my life, such as my final reflection and the rest of my podcast series. I have an idea for my reflection and if anyone has any feedback, I'd appreciate it! I would like to write a song, reflecting on my experience in ECMP 355, record myself playing it, with my guitar (and voice of course) using iMovie and post it to my blog.

Thoughts? And if you haven't heard my podcast yet, please listen, it's only 11 minutes long, and let me know what you think! Thanks!

My Professional Portfolio

My portfolio is complete!

You can view the different parts of my portfolio using the tabs at the top of my blog under the header. I also made a "Podcasts" tab so that when all of my podcasts are posted, you can locate each of them on the one page rather than scrolling through my blog posts. I think I will also post a link to my Posterous page on my "podcasts" page as well, so that it can connect to my main page.

So now it's on to podcast, episode 2 and I really gotta get rolling on my final reflection. I have a page full of notes, and no way to display them at this time! I have some thinking to do on that!

Enjoy!

Final Project Ep. 1 (The Canadiana Podcast)

Podcast_Ep._1_(June_13).m4a Listen on Posterous

It is here! Episode 1! Yippee! I created the first of hopefully four podcasts for my final project!

So this podcast was recorded using Garageband, and I decided to just start over, and leave my first podcast attempt for my own personal reflection, plus I needed to re-record all of the my voice because the orders of the songs were changed and whatnot.

It was harder to create this podcast because I had to cut every song down, and matching everything up was more difficult than just pulling the song into the track and letting it go.

I decided this time to post my podcast using Posterous, which I am finding to be more user friendly. I had to load my podcast a couple of times though because it kept freezing a certain points and wouldn't load anymore. It loaded, and then I noticed that my pictures for each chapter didn't come up, only the audio track. Does anyone know how to change this? I know that you can open my podcast with the program of your choice (ie: iTunes, etc) is there a program that will play it with my pictures? I know that Podomatic had my pictures and everything in it, so if it doesn't do that on Posterous, I might want to change...

So yes, it's far from perfect but it's mine! I have many ideas for more so either tonight or tomorrow I'm gonna get started on the next one and post it as soon as I can! Feedback is appreciated but be kind, I am a little self-conscious of hearing my voice coming out of these speakers! Ha.

My Blog Reflections

On my blogging experience:

• By taking ECMP 355 I discovered that though I suck at journaling, I absolutely love blogging. To me, I like having an audience to my thoughts, I love getting comments, being able to post video or pictures or links. I have been reading various blogs for months now, and this was a great opportunity for me to begin my own.
• I now realize that I should have used tags long ago on my blog posts for ECMP 355, so now my posts, especially about the final projects/reflections will have the tags on them. Unfortunately, my blogs post about my final project with my podcasts do not have the tag up until this point. 
• There are many things that I would like to change about my blog at this point, especially finding out how to create headers on my blog, that can link to my posts about my final project and professional portfolio.  
• I want to continue blogging and working to perfect my blog. I like being able to have something that is mine, and it is cool to look at my stats and see that my post on being a "Tweetcher" got 95 views! That is crazy to me. But you have no idea that people are reading your blog if there are no comments, so I'm glad that I looked at my stats and saw that yes, some posts have like, 3 reads, but some have more reads, and some have many, and that is very cool to me.

My frequency of posting/consistency:

• I think that I have been very consistent with blogging and I know that is because I enjoy it so much. I really like being able to take 20 minutes and write up a post about what is going on in my day, or address something that was covered in class, although I realized that I spent most of the posts talking about myself. Surprised?
• I have a total of 24 posts up until today (June 11), some of them are drafts for my professional portfolio and some are for my final project blog posts, but I have been blogging on average at least 2 posts per week. 

Comments on my own blog/others' blogs:

• I was disappointed by the lack of comments on my blog. I don't know if this was because people weren't reading my blog, if they didn't like my posts, if it was because it was on blogger instead of wordpress?
• I found commenting on wordpress blogs frustrating, because after every comment that I left, I had to check my email and confirm my comment. Why did I have to do that for every single comment?
• I tried to comment as much as I could on people's blogs, but I found it hard sometimes, not knowing what to say. Sort of a, "if I have nothing interesting to say I'd best no say anything at all" kind of feeling. 

On my contributions to the class:

• I was super disappointed about not being able to attend hardly any sessions except for one. I really enjoyed being there and getting to talk to the class and tell them what I was doing, getting to use the chat and contribute to the conversation. My days during this spring class have been open for the most part, but it is my evenings that fill up, which is why I thought an online class would be perfect. I have watched all of the recordings of ECMP 355 and blogged about them afterward. So my main contribution to the class is through my blog. This is a good way for all of us to keep in touch, especially if we cannot make it to the live sessions.