ASME National Conference 2007

Blogging your composition process

Sibelius has two accredited Training Partners in Perth.

Laurence LePage ljlepage@iinet.net.au Mark Sadler mark@scitech.org.au

For interstate visitors to ASME ‘07, see the web address above or call us for your local Sibelius Training Partner.

www.sibelius.com/training

Prof

essi

ona

l Dev

elop

men

t &

Tra

inin

gSibelius Professional Development & Training

Many state and international curricula have wrestled with the problem of identifying original, not plagiarised, composi-tion by students. Asking them to make a process diary—somewhere they can record the compositional decisions they made an copies of the scores as they worked on them—is the method most widely used to authenticate that the work is the student’s own.

Pedagogically the process diary has its own value too. Through reflection, the student can revise what the success-ful steps were in the creative process, and avoid making any mistakes a second time. The teacher can continually assess the progress of the student through the diary (therefore not taking up valuable lesson time), and if the student makes calamitous changes to the work later on, they’ve got early stages of the piece recorded to fall back to.

Nowadays our students compose nearly entirely in com-puter programs—we can discuss the pros and cons of this at length! But one of the biggest advantages is that it’s very easy to make a back-up file of the progress of the piece every day it’s worked on. And if your scores are recorded digitally—why not save them alongside your diary entries in a digital form too—and that’s where the blog (short for Web log, an online diary) comes in.

Blogs have many advantages over the paper composition portfolio or scrapbook. For a start, they won’t start to overfill with many copies of the same 40+ page minimalist compo-sition. Secondly, the student doesn’t need to hand a blog in for the teacher to mark it. The student can add entries from anywhere with an internet connection, and the teacher can read and comment on the entries from home.

And, of course, the final advantage is that if your school is using Sibelius, your students can blog Scorch files, which means that they can listen to their progress, share it with their family, and print it out from anywhere with an internet connection too. Their scores literally come alive on the inter-net.

Students love blogging too. It’s a technology they’re com-fortable with, because they probably have a myspace ac-count or similar already, or have a friend who does.

Today we’ll look at three examples of how you can set up composition process diaries via blogging: a working exam-ple from a school, doing it yourself in a web publishing pro-gram, and doing it on a public blogging site.

But first we’ll need to know how to make a Scorch file.

Why blog?

Keeping a track of drafts

Many students have myspace accounts and are used to blogging

Blogging composition process

www.sibelius.com/training

Professional Developm

ent & Training

Sibelius Professional Development & Training

It’s important to understand that there isn’t really such a thing as one scorch file. When you export a Scorch file from Sibelius (by going to File > Export > Scorch Web Page), you’re actually making an HTML file (which is a web page) to go with the Sibelius file you’re working on.

You might have noticed that if you ever save a Scorch web page in a different location to that of the original Sibelius file, Sibelius will make a copy of the Sibelius file in that new location too.

This is because you must upload both files to your blog or website in order for Scorch to work. You link to the HTML file, which in turn loads the Scorch plug-in which displays the Sibelius file, plays it back, and so on.

If students don’t have the Scorch plug-in, they can download it for free from www.sibelius.com/scorch

After choosing to export any Sibelius score as a Scorch Web Page, you will be asked for a location to save the files. Choose a folder that you’ll remember, and click Save.

Next you choose the settings for how the score should display on the web page. By default, they’ll appear as they do on the right, but a good place to start (you can experiment later) is by choosing Classic under the template list, and changing the width to 800 pixels (the height will change automatically to keep the proportions right).

Make sure that Allow printing and saving are ticked, and click OK.

Making Scorch websites quickly

It’s a little off topic, but if you have a folder of scores (for instance parts for a new band arrange-ment, or all of one classes’ compositions), you can convert them all into Scorch files at once. Sibelius will even make a contents page (called an index page) for you too.

Go to Plug-ins > Batch processing > Convert folder of scores to Web Pages. Change the set-tings to those on the right, unless you’ve got a little more experience on how you want your Scorch pages to look, Browse to the folder with the scores in it, and tick Create index page and give it a suitable name. Once it has exported, find the folder you put the website in, and double click the index.htm file.

Making Scorch files

Sibelius Scorch logo

Export settings for Scorch

Making a website of your scores all at once

www.sibelius.com/training

Prof

essi

ona

l Dev

elop

men

t &

Tra

inin

gSibelius Professional Development & Training

The MLC School in Sydney has implemented blogging within its intranet. In addition, the programmers who implemented blogging for the students were keen to use Scorch technology, and created an automated script so that when you upload a Sibelius file, it automatically creates the HTML necessary to call the Scorch plug-in and display the file.

What this means is that students can skip the stage where they have to export a Scorch Web Page—all they do is upload their Sibelius file, and the conversion is done for them as part of the process.

Example 2: using a web publishing program

There are many good web and blog publishing programs which will allow you to blog directly to a server. The advan-tage with this solution over using online blogging tool (be they on your intranet or on the internet) is that you can work offline, and publish next time you have a connection. So if you want to blog your process on the train home on your laptop, you can.

iWeb is a website building program which is part of Apple’s iLife 2006 suite. iWeb is ideal for education and for first-time website authors because it requires no HTML code knowledge and produces very good-looking pages. It’s also useful for those with some website experience who find updating their website regularly a little tedious. Some limita-tions, however, may be evident to those used to profes-sional products such as Dreamweaver.

In Sibelius, export any scores you want to blog as Scorch Web Pages as already discussed. In iWeb, create a new page based on the Blog template. Once open, delete the picture (or change it to one appropriate to the page, for instance a page with “my composition blog” might have a picture of some manuscript paper) and change the title as necessary.

In the body text, write your blog and include some informa-tion about your score and the title of the piece.

Highlight the title of the piece, then go to Insert > Hyper-link > File. A dialog box will open, asking you to choose the file to link to. Browse to the folder you saved your Scorch file(s) in, and you will see two files for each score. One is a Sibelius file, and ends with .sib, and one is an html file and ends with .htm. In this step you must choose the .htm file, which is telling iWeb to open a new webpage to load your score. Then click open.

Example 1: school intranet

Students blogging at MLC School

Setting up a blog in iWeb

www.sibelius.com/training

Professional Developm

ent & Training

Sibelius Professional Development & Training

We’ve now created a link to Sibelius’ HTML file, but this is only half the job. We need iWeb to upload the .sib Sibelius file to the same folder on the server in order for the Scorch plug-in to find it an open it.

To make this happen, go to Insert > Text, and insert a small text box which you should position at the bottom of the page. Into it type one full stop (period) and highlight it.

Now go to Insert > Hyperlink > File again, and this time when the dialog box opens, choose your .sib Sibelius file. This will make iWeb upload it along with the page, so that when someone clicks on the first link, the score will load properly. You must upload both files.

You should now repeat these steps for any extra Scorch files you want to upload. When you get to the last step, just add another full stop in the same text box, and link the new .sib file to it.

You’re now left with a text box with one or more dots in it. Since the reason for this text box is only to make iWeb up-load the Sibelius files, you can now hide it. You can do this by highlighting the text, opening the Fonts dialog, and changing it to Size 1 (which doesn’t actually make it invisi-ble, just very small!), and/or you can put an image or button (Insert > Button > Hit Counter, for example) over the top of it.

Next time you come to add a blog, you don’t need to create the whole blog page again—just click the Add Entry button as seen on the right. iWeb will automatically date your blogs and put the most recent at the top of your webpage.

iWeb cont.

A Scorch Web Page

Creating further blog entries

www.sibelius.com/training

Prof

essi

ona

l Dev

elop

men

t &

Tra

inin

gSibelius Professional Development & Training

There are many blogging sites out there, and most of them are free. The problem for you as the responsible teacher is choosing a site that is private enough for your school’s IT policy. For this reason you may choose to go with one of the two initial examples—giving the responsibility to your IT department to create an internal system for you to use, or using some software such as iWeb to publish the blogs yourselves internally.

There are sites deliberately designed for education users, however. One such site is www.edublogs.org, where blogs can only be accessed by other edublogs users who are recognised by the student, giving you a double level of security.

You can also host your own education blogs, for a price, which gives you complete security. This, however, is something your IT department would need to look into.

Students can create their own blog by clicking on the K-12 link on the homepage. Once they’ve created their user ac-count (where they un-tick the “list on Google etc” option!) they choose to login, which will put them in the backend of Edublogs, where they can write their blogs, change the look of their blog, and much more.

Uploading Sibelius files is not supported directly at Edublogs, but you can create another account at www.divshare.com (choose this site because it is supported by Edublogs). Simply zip your files to-gether by putting them in a folder to-gether then right-clicking and on Win-dows choosing Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder or on Mac choosing Create Archive… Upload them to divshare and link to them (divshare will give you the link) from your blog. It seems a little long-winded, but it’s quite a simple process and what’s more it’s free.

Example 3: Using free public blogging sites

Edublogs have plenty of reasons why you should use their site

The backend of Edublogs, where students can write their blogs

A blog made in minutes at Edublogs

www.sibelius.com/training

Professional Developm

ent & Training

Sibelius Professional Development & Training

Space for notes...