An audio blog is a great way to share your learning process with future teachers or employers. An audio blog can be presented in whatever format you wish - a simple recording, spoken journal, etc. You can decide if you want your audio blog to either take the form of a short summary of the blog, or a full in-depth description of the blog - either way, this guide will help you make it.

So, what is an audio blog? An audio blog is very similar to a written blog; however, you are purely focusing on the use of audio throughout the process to comment on a person's experiences, thoughts, or activities, instead.

This guide is going to offer prompts for you to think about and possibly reflect upon to help you produce your own audio blog. An audio blog is very similar to a blog, therefore it is still you making a record of a personal journey, so we won't be telling you what you need to include, just like the blog we are going to try and be the inspiration when you need it. But to begin, let’s make some decisions!

All of the different kinds of blog-posts are relevant with the audio-posts too. Audio blogs also include a range of different post types.

The options are as follows:

List-based: A list of audio recordings that are not necessarily connected and just appear in chronological order without any formatting, curating, or thematic divisions.

News-based: The blogger highlights a key story or events and provides their comments or perspectives. This could be a spoken journal of one of the workshops. 

Interview: The blogger uses the experiences of other people and presents them as part of a wider narrative on a given topic – this allows for greater perspectives to be shared. This could be an audio recording of an interview taking place between you and minimum one other person. 

Review: This type of blog provides reviews on things. Due to it being in the form of an audio blog, there will need to be as much description as possible to create an image for the other recipient listening. 

Personal: In a personal blog the author discusses their own experiences and builds a kind of timeline of events. For the purpose of your audio blog, this could be in the form of a spoken journal to demonstrate the development of your skills. 

Explainer: Provided audio recording accounts of something, such as a workshop, talking the reader through the experience of taking part. 

Before we begin, we need to consider what platform/platforms you are going to use to record and store your audio. There are lots of different platforms that can help you. You might want to try some of these before you get started: 

● If you have access to a smartphone, tablet, iPad, etc. you could use the audio/voice recorder on that device. You are able to record and store audio files, then with the possibility of transferring them to an external device (laptop, stick, drive, etc) if you wished. 

● https://riverside.fm - full instructions on how to use Riverside.fm can be found here: You are able to record up to 2 hours for free and can download your tracks for your own use when ready.  

● https://anchor.fm/ by Spotify. Full instructions on how to use Anchor.fm can be found here: There are no limits to the amount you can record but the expectation is that you will upload to Spotify and link from there. 

Pick an audio blog name. Now, remember, this is for future employers/educators so make sure it is fun, clear and to the point but not inappropriate! 

Now we have set up our blog we can start to think about populating it. Let’s start with some broad questions...

My blog’s theme is going to be.....

It will have at least ..... entries.

You can now think about creating a nice welcome to say to your audience. This needs to include a form of instruction to your audio blog, but also engaging enough to make them want to continue listening! Perhaps you’d like to include some personal details about you? Or a list of keywords? Or an outline of what to expect?

Now let’s think about creating your audio blog. To make the process as easy and smooth as possible, you may want to write out your answers to these prompts, or anything else that you think would be helpful, so then you can visual what you are going to want/need to say.

It might be that only some of these prompts are relevant for this particular audio blog, and that is okay, but try working through them and see what you create.

The workshop I am reflecting on is.....

The skills I am going to cover in my blog post are.....

My audience is for this one is.....

The post will be …......long

I’ll make it visually interesting by......

In what ways might I use sound?

I’ll think about critical thinking by.....

I’ll think about creativity by.......

I’ll think about collaboration by......

I’ll thinking about communication by.........

I will review......

I will explain.......

I’ll share my experiences of.......