Technology in our classroom

Have a great holiday for the next two weeks.  If you are going away, remember those social skills we have been working on:

• Tools of the trade
• Don’t take the bait
• Look, listen and learn
• Dare to care
• Stand tall

Also remember you are on your own with your blog during these two weeks.  I will not be moderating comments, so if you are unsure either delete it, show it to mum or dad or wait till after the holidays to show me.

If you want to start getting organized for next term, topics we will be looking at are:

• Survival as relating to novel “Hatchet”, your own survival in this world, famous survivors
• Olympics and China hopefully as a collaborative project with another grade 7 class
• Sumo wrestling as part of our LOTE programme

 Thanks to Pina for reminding me I haven’t included the source of the photo.

According to our clustrmap, we have now had over 1000 visitors to our class blog since we began on 14 March, 2008.  I wonder if you can make a list of the countries these people have come from?  If you watch our feedjit map, you might get some clues by looking at the flags.  Remember, countries not states is what you have to name.  Have you visited any blogs from other countries of the world?

I have just been looking at your links in your blogroll and have noticed a few games sites being added.  Now this is OK as long as you,  the writer of the blog, are old enough to be using that game site according to the terms and conditions of the games site.

So if you have to be at least 13 years old to use the games site and YOU the writer are only 12 , then you can’t have that link on your blog until you turn 13.  It would also be a good idea to write a post about some of the websites you are recommending, making sure you mention how old you have to be to use that site.

This is the same for other widgets you are adding to your sidebars.  For example Binga has now turned 13 so he can have a voki and feedjit map.  But if you are only 12, sorry, you will have to wait a few more months.

As part of having a blog of your own, you have to write comments on other students’ blogs both in our room and in other countries.  But what have your comments looked like? 

Oh cool, what a gr8 blog!

Kewl car! lol

Keep up the blogging! 

Make sure you visit my blog, cya!

Maybe this type of comment is acceptable for your first few comments, but remember you are trying to improve your communication skills with your audience, the readers of your blog.  What could the blog owner come back with as a comment?

Thanks, yes I will keep blogging.

This doesn’t really keep the conversation flowing. Your challenge for today’s computer lesson is to look through the comments written on your blog.  Which words or phrases were used, which allowed you to keep the conversation going? Who writes great comments on your blog and why are they great?  Also remember to complete the blogging survey from the previous post.

I noticed that many of you are now starting to conduct polls or surveys in your blogs.  I read CC’s post and a comment from one of his readers who mentions how to embed a survey form in a blog and get google to do all the work of tallying etc. 

So here is one I created and I hope you all submit your answers to the survey about good comments.

Congratulations go to  Hannah, Brandon, Alex, Kade, Emma, PatriciaLee, Jack, Wylie and Ben from Mrs Spencer’s class who have shown Miss W they are prepared to work hard with blogging. These students have written posts of their own to add to our class blog; have made many sensible and conversational comments on posts I had written or other students had written and had visited blogs from other students and teachers around the world and left comments there.

Over this week, these students will have received an email saying how they can log into their own blog. Next week I will spend some time with these students in setting up the presentation, blogroll and sidebar widgets on their blogs.

Photo source

I have been blogging since January, the class since February, some students since March and today I created the final blogs for individual students. Some students in the class decided they didn’t want their own blog after I mentioned a few rules.  These were:

• Both  you and I are administrators until you do something wrong - you will then become  an editor.  As a class we have done a lot of work on being internet safe and also looking out for each other as part of life skills.  Hopefully I will not have to demote anyone!
• You will have to write comments on blogs belonging to students in our room as well as those on our blogroll from other parts of the world.
• You will have to make sure you respond to people who write comments on your blog.
• You will have to write at least one BTN report on your blog every month and one post about something that interests you every month.  So at least two posts per month.
• You cannot publish a post until you have emailed me, I have viewed the post and sent an email back to you with my approval for publishing.
• All photos must be sourced, preferably from Flickr Creative Commons or permission must have been gained from the photographer via email and acknowledged on the bottom of the post.

Am I being too tough on you? 

I know this means a lot of work on my behalf reading posts  before they are published and emailing back to you suggestions for improvement eg spelling and grammar. But at this stage of your blogging experience, I am prepared to put in the extra time.

Binga has just celebrated his 13th birthday so now can have a lot more widgets on his sidebar.  I found another site today that is for those who are over 13 but you still need parental permission. 

It allows you to create a quiz to add to your blog.  I love looking at optical illusions, so found this quiz already made and have now just embedded it in my blog.

I typed out everything I needed here in visual editor first, then just before I was going to publish, I changed to code and added the code I had copied from the website.  I then hit publish straight away.

The website is MyStudiyo

I am trying to make sure students only use copyright free images in their posts.  I now have them using flickr creative commons preferably

  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License . 

But if there is one photo they REALLY want to use, I will often email the photographer to get their permission.

As my students are doing work on Survival and looking at the Inuit people, I found a series of photos on Flickr but they were not copyright free.  They were all stills from a series of films that I had used a few years ago at school, but had since lost the video.  Would students be able to use these in their voicethreads and photostory activities?

My Request letter

Dear Sir/Madam,

My students have been doing some work on the Inuit people and are about to complete some activities which will involve using images in photostory and voicethread and they would like to use some of the photos on the Netsilik Eskimo series.  Would this cost money as we would then probably put the final presentations on our class blog?

I then gave the URL for our class blog and the Inuit activity page.

Their replyDear Sue,

You seem like an amazingly motivated and creative teacher. We would be happy to support your students work by permitting you free use of some stills from our Netsilik Eskimo films for the class story telling.Keep us informed about your work.

All the best,

Cynthia Close
Executive Director

cclose@der.orgcclose@der.org

Often all it takes is a polite letter asking for permission and it will be granted. 

Thanks to those photographers and companies who allow students to use their works in their blogs.

This post is by Ben, who is not a student in our class, but he was very keen to tell our readers about blue tongue lizards.

Skinks have overlapping scales that are usually smooth and contain small plates of bone. There are more than 300 species of skink in Australia. Most skinks have 4 legs and 3-5 toes but the legless lizard have no legs which means that they have no toes.

Blue tongues are the largest member of the skink family. Blue tongue lizards can live for 20 years in captivity and 5 years longer, that is if they are looked after properly.

DIET:  Blue tongue lizards eat carrion, fruit, dog food, egg yolk, baby food, insects, some types of flowers and their favorite are snails. 
 
There are 6 species of blue tongues and here are the 3 most common ones.
     -   Blotched blue-Tongue
     -   Eastern blue-tongue
     -   Shingleback

The Shingleback and blue tongue have a triangular head, but the male’s head are more triangular than the females, that is one of the ways that you can tell if a blue tongue is a male or female. Another way to tell with the Blotched blue-tongue is that the females have more of a blotchy pattern on the back as for the males, their back is more stripy.  Blue tongues don’t have as hard scales as Shinglebacks but they are still hard.

If you have a Shingleback or blue tongue in your garden and you have dogs or cats, feed them inside and if you see anything that the dogs or cats will eat near where the lizard lives, get it so the lizard and pets won’t be attracted to it and the pets won’t eat the lizard. Try to keep the pets away from the lizard as much as possible. If you are doing something to your garden, try not to do as much around the where the lizard lives. Before going anywhere, check the driveway to see if there is a lizard and If there is, move it and then go so you don’t run it over.   
 
SHINGLEBACK:      
The Shingleback is also called Boggi, Sleepy lizard and Stumpy-tailed lizard. The Shingleback has 1-4 babies after a few months of mating (I’m not quite sure when). Shinglebacks mainly give birth every 2nd year. Shinglebacks and blue tongues mate for life. Once the male finds the female, he will eat by her, sleep under the same bush and walk behind her. If another male comes around the female, the male (female’s mate) will fight with the rival male and might leave scars to the body. Shinglebacks have hard scales so it will be harder for predators do bite or grasp them. 
 
 The female Eastern blue-tongue gives birth to round about 10-19 babies 3-5 months after mating. The Blotched Blue Tongue has can have 5-20 babies. The babies like it a bit warmer than the adults for about 6 months. The babies love eating mealworms but they can’t have too many otherwise they will get stomach pains and they can die. If you keep blue tongues, don’t keep the babies in with adults otherwise the adults will trample them or eat them if they get too hungry. If the female lizard are carrying too many babies or get too cold, she will release a form of acid in her uterus were her babies are and they dissolve and the female will use the babies as a food source, this is called aborting.

Photo source                               Photo source