Technology in our classroom

Hey, hey, just because I am away doesn’t mean you don’t have any work to do.  You have

• your presentations about a period of time in earth’s history to get organized
• check the history blog for links about the period of earth’s  history
• if you haven’t finished your work on “Bridge to Terabithia” do that
• read more of ‘Bridge to Terabithia’
• in your blog write a post about a time you didn’t have to come to school - was it the fault of nature? was it illness? was it a special event?
• leave comments on some new blogs in the blogging challenge
• catch up with the activities in the blogging challenge

Finally, if the relief teacher brings work for you to do, I will expect it finished before going on with the work I mentioned above.

Over the weekend, my neighbours and I held a regatta out on the street in front of our houses.  A regatta you say – but you need water for that. Well look below at the photos that I took.

One of the neighbours called the ABC and they sent down a photographer and reporter.  Our regatta was mentioned on the news on Saturday night.  Since then the water level has risen even further and two cars about the same size as mine have been stuck and had to be pulled out of the water on the road. This is not good for the underside of the car nor the engine and certainly not the brakes.

Underneath that water are some dangerous potholes – one at least two metres long and about 50cms deep. The council are going to try and pump away some of the water but that won’t be until Wednesday so we have been told.  With more rain due tonight and tomorrow, I feel safer in my house and not trying to leave my driveway to get to school.

Since last week, I noticed a few classes in the first list of the participant’s page now have blogrolls with student individual blogs listed on them.  Also please note the blogmeister blogs have individual blogs on their sidebar as well. 

Classes and students have been out visiting and commenting on lots of blogs and, thanks to Sue Waters from the Edublogger, we now have a teacher, pre-service teacher or student helping with commenting on all class and individual blogs.  Most people using Blogger blogs have made sure commenters can use a profile of anonymous or name/URL.

Lots of students have created blog and comment avatars, but remember, if you have uploaded it on Edublogs, then it will only appear when you comment on an Edublogs blog.  There is no way your comment avatar will appear on all blogs.

So, I hope everyone is enjoying the challenges.  We have classes and students taking part from the following countries: Australia, U.S.A., New Zealand, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Hong Kong, Canada, Scotland, Thailand, Venezuela, Greece, Chile and Basq country.  Hopefully Portugal will also be joining us soon.

Challenges this week

1. To keep up the international flavour, add at least one widget to your sidebar that shows your reader a bit about the area you live in. This could be a weather or time widget.  What else might be appropriate?
2. Visit a blog from at least five different countries not including your own.  Leave a useful comment on the blog. This might include asking a question about the area the blogger lives in. 
3. Now write a post about what you learnt about the five bloggers you have visited. What did you find interesting about their blog? Is there someone in your class you would recommend read that blog as well?
4. Make sure you have read this PDF blog post about adding a URL as a hyperlink in a comment.  Try using this in activity 2 by linking to an interesting website about your country that the blogger could visit.
5. With so many countries taking part that have bloggers writing and speaking different languages, it is nearly necessary to have some form of translator widget on your blog. Can you find a widget to translate in Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Greek and Basq?

Attribution:

Original image: ‘Welcoming‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/56013895@N00/122872445
by: fly      Released under an Attribution License

WOW! Two posts for the challenge this week.  Some students and classes took a great deal of care writing their commenting guidelines from last week’s challenge. Have a look at these:

Abbey, Mrs Yollis, Mr Miraglia, Jessica, Brad, Chris, Emily, Kelly - teachers are the same, all over the world Kelly!!

• Fab4 even made a video earlier this year about why they want to blog.
• Mrs Cousino has some tips for starter sentences when commenting on blogs.
• Mrs Bee’s class have created ’scooper tops.‘  What are these you ask?
• Mrs Thompson’s class were advertising the blogging challenge.

These students wrote posts about the comments they left:  Brad, Abby

This week’s challenges

1. How are the comments made by Brad and Abby the same? How are they different? Which comment(s) would lead on to further conversation between Brad or Abby and the owner of the blog?
2. How can you write a great post so lots of people leave comments?  Check out this post by Sue Waters from the Edublogger. Write a post you think will invite a lot of comments.
3. When someone leaves a comment, are you leaving an answer for them in your comment area, are you visiting their blog to leave a comment or are you sending an email to them if they left their email address?  Which of these three do you think carries the conversation on about the topic in your blog? Why?
4. If you want to have threaded comments in your blog, then enter this competition run by The Edublogger.  It closes soon so you might want to write this post first.

Too much to have to say in one post this week, so I have divided it up into a blogging challenge post and a commenting challenge post.

It is great to see so many students with their own blogs participating in the challenge.  Remember though, there are also some students on class blogrolls. Visit them to read their posts and leave comments as well.

What is a blogroll, you ask?  Now that you have started visiting other blogs and looking at the participant list to find students with similar interests, you might start finding some blogs that you really like.  You might visit these every day, but how do you remember their URL?  This is where a blogroll comes in handy.

If you look on the sidebar of my blog, you will notice I have certain subheadings such as:

• 2009 bloggers
• links numeracy
• links science
• teacher blogs  

These are all part of my blogroll.  Notice the subheadings or categories are alphabetical beginning with numbers.  So you will need to think about what the names are for your categories. 

If using Edublogs, to create the link category headings, go to  links > link category  To add some links such as this blog and your friends blogs, go to links>add new.  Remember to say what category you put the link under and also use http:// in front of the URL.

Just to confuse you and your teacher, there is also another heading called ‘categories’.  This though, relates to the posts you write about.  These categories appear in the header area or at the footer section of your post. 

What are your posts mainly about?

• family and friends
• schoolwork
• my interests
• my future 

You might use these as post categories.  If using Edublogs, to set them up from your dashboard go to posts>categories. Why are categories and tags important when writing your posts?  See if you can find out that answer over the next week.

Your challenges this week

1. Add at least 10 blogs to your blog roll.  Make sure you have at least two different categories.
2. When writing posts, begin adding categories. You should only have a few of these – it is like the chapter heading of a book. Go back to your previous posts and change the category.  If writing a post for the challenge, perhaps a category ‘challenge 09′ would be useful.
3. If you have taken part in a previous challenge,  you also need to write a post recommending at least 5 blogs you think students and classes should add to their blogroll.  Remember to give reasons why that blog should be added.
4. If you still have lots of time to do some more challenges, then visit the blog run by last year’s participants.  Leave some comments on the posts and perhaps you will also find some other links for your blogroll. Check out the categories used on this blog in their blog roll.

One of the participants in this blogging challenge has also organized her own ‘green’ challenge. I know we have many students and classes interested in our environment and how we can help improve it for future generations.  Please read her blurb below, and join in her challenge as well.

Hi! I am needing more bloggers for my blogging challenge, “The Big Green Help.” If you could help me “advertise,” or get bloggers, that would be great. Any ideas, posts, or comments will work.

For those of you looking for more information about this challenge, here it is:
“The Big Green Help” blogging challenge is to help students and teachers all around the world discover what they can do to help our planet Earth. Students and teachers will also get the chance to become better bloggers through posts and comments. Challenge participants will complete a series of challenges to try to help Earth. There will be a few different categories that you can become a winner in (there will be 1-3 winners per category). Winners will receive a cool banner that they can add to the side of their blog. They will also receive more visitors to their blog, more comments, and a mention in the winner list post. The first challenge will be posted on September 25, and after that, new challenges will be posted about once a week. Sign up at the link below (To participate completely, please sign up before September 25, although later admissions are welcome):

Here’s the link to sign up:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dEpfaUp2ZlJMU1p3S3pOWjNvSk5ZbFE6MA..

Here’s the link that challenges will be posted at:
http://laurenc604.edublogs.org/

Thanks!
~laurenc604

So please visit Lauren and her blog where you can register for her ‘green’ challenge.

Sue Waters from The Edublogger has told me some people are having trouble registering for the blogging challenge because Google docs is filtered in your school.  So I have included here an Excel spreadsheet for you to fill in and email back to me at tasteach56atgmaildotcom.

Also some of our younger students are having trouble knowing the difference between their email address and their blog’s URL, so maybe teachers could also fill in the spreadsheet and return to me.  This would affect those students who are already on the participant list, but have some red writing next to their name.

Register here for challenge if google docs blocked

Having run three blogging challenges and having more and more participants each time, I find it fairly hard to keep up with all the commenting.  I try to comment when the student or class joins the challenge, then at least three other times throughout the challenge.

So Sue Waters from The Edublogger put out a call for commenting helpers.  She has allocated each helper with 5 class blogs and about 10 student blogs.  This will mean every class and student will have a visitor at least once a week, if not more often.  All helpers will be either a teacher, a student, a pre-service teacher or a blogger related to education.  Sue or I will have checked out their blog before allocating them to class and student blogs.

If you are interested in being a helper with the commenting, please drop by The Edublogger leaving your name and the URL of your blog.  Sue has included some hints and tips about leaving comments and email addresses to contact either her or myself if you have any queries.

We are asking each helper to comment back on this post and to leave a little blurb about themselves so you can come here to find out about your helper.

Looking through many of your first posts about what you want to get out of this challenge, most of you mentioned cyber conversations with other students around the world.  But how can you do that? 

Consider that at the beginning of 2008, there were over 70 million blogs in the world.  How is someone going to find yours?  I asked a similar question when I started blogging in this post.  Why is nobody commenting? What were some of the tips teachers and my readers gave me about getting comments?

Now check out this post by Priscila in Argentina about how blogging has given her a world wide audience. Check out Abbey’s blogging story and the changes she has made since November 2008 when she began blogging.

This week’s challenges

1.  Write a post or even a page about commenting on your blog. What sort of comments will you accept? Do you have to leave a name with a URL?  Are your comments moderated? Explain what this means. Will you accept critical comments about your spelling and grammar etc? 

 Mr Toft has written something on his blog about commenting guidelines to help give you an idea.

Our students from Thailand have already set blogging and commenting guidelines at their school.

2.  Visit at least 5 blogs from the participant list and leave appropriate comments.  Keep a record of what you said in a word document or discuss the comments you left  in a post.  Think about what you would like as comments on your blog before you write these. We will be looking at these again at the end of the challenge to see how you have improved with your commenting.

Remember you can see what all the participants have written in their posts by visiting this page and clicking on the link. Choose a post you would be interested in to leave a comment on.

3. Add a clustrmap to your blog sidebar.  Check here if using Edublogs. Go to enhancing your blog with widgets.

4.  Add another widget that shows your global audience.  It might be like the flag one on my classblog or if you are over 13, you could add the feedjit map as well.  Maybe you also need a translator widget to help our non English speaking readers to translate your posts. Check what other classes have as widgets to help their global audience.

Attribution:  Original image: ‘Ioni’s world DSC01433‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/99037763@N00/346630496
by: Dimitris Papazimouris  

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

As I have been putting together the student blogging challenge participant list on the page above my avatar, I have run across a few problems.

• Some students and class blogs have given me the wrong URL for their blog.
• Some ‘blogspot’ blogs are not allowing comments.  Students will need the username/URL option available to leave a comment.

So, I am asking all students and teachers, to check the participant list. 

1. Make sure the link on your name gets to your blog.
2. Make sure it will be easy for students to leave comments.
3. Check if I have your name listed more than once.  Remember there could be more than one person with your name.

If there are any alterations needed to the participant list, please leave me a comment here.