Technology in our classroom

What an unusual title for a blog post but today is officially ‘World Toilet Day’. This is celebrated every year on November 19 and you can find lots of information from the following websites:

Add a banner or logo from here.

Why do people squat when going to the toilet?  Check it out here.

Lots of links about ‘World Toilet Day’.

Our class squatted for one minute.  Some comments were:

• Legs went numb after a while.
• Hard not to put your hands down for balance.
• Started hurting your thighs.
• Difficult because we are not used to squatting.
• Strained your muscles.

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com
Well, this week is the final week of the student blogging challenge. In the last ten weeks, bloggers and commenters have had the chance to do the following:

Write blog posts:

• why did you  join the challenge
• write a post for BAD on climate change
• favourite interests
• favourite holidays or countries to visit
• storytelling using images
• how to write a post that invites comments
• favourite blogs you visit
• Edublogger competition post
• what did you learn from other bloggers
• about a positive digital footprint
• a challenge post for the international student blog

Commenting:

• count three out activity
• own commenting guidelines
• comparing comments
• replying to comments
• commenting habits after eight weeks of the challenge
• visit posts from overseas students and classes to leave comments
• visit Lonely Planet blog to leave comments on a post

Non written posts:

• comic
• quiz
• poll
• images only
• using embed code for links in comments and widgets

Blog presentation:

• create avatar
• about page
• translation widget
• weather widget
• create blogroll
• add badges
• clustrmap
• using tags and categories

WHEW!! That is a lot of learning in just ten weeks, yet some of you want more.  Well here is this week’s challenge.

Week 10 challenge

1. What topics would you want to write about if you take part in another challenge next year?
2. What questions would you ask overseas students that they could then answer in a post?

Even though the official challenge is now over, I will be posting a review survey next week.  I would appreciate as many students and teachers taking part in this survey to help me plan for next year when I begin the challenge again in February/March.

Miss Wyatt’s first try at creating an animoto. Hayley is complaining about the oldies music Miss Wyatt chose for the background of this animoto.

Do you want to take part in another digital technology competition like ‘Doodle for Google”?

Then check out this website. 

Notice the closing date is 30th November, so you dont have long to get it done.

The challenge is to design the 2010 edna schools calendar.

Original image: ‘2008 Calendar‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/80812899@N00/2180397669
by: Dier

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

This is it!!

The penultimate challenge! 

Time is running out for you.

 What do you need to do?

Visit this blog written by students and teachers who have taken part in previous blogging challenges.  Checkout the posts written by students.  Then come back here to read about your challenge for this week.

Challenge week 9

Write a post you think would be suitable to add to this international student blog.  It will need writing, a question at the end, images, perhaps other media like a poll or slideshare.  What topic will you choose?

If you would like to be an author on the international blog, leave a comment here on this post.  Also remember to hyperlink to this post when you write your challenge so I can visit.  The best challenges will be added to the international blog.

Teachers - if you would be interested in having your class join the international blog, please leave a comment on the international blog under the page heading “Join us”. I will start organizing the calendar again so each class has about two weeks or a fortnight in which to have control of the blog.

Original image: ‘Time‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24742305@N00/2331754875
by: John Morgan

Released under an Attribution License

I’ve noticed there are some schools taking part who are a bit behind in the blogging challenge – they may have had two weeks holidays somewhere in October – so I decided no challenge this week.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t visit lots of other blogs and leave some great comments.  I know there were lots of posts about Halloween – I wonder if this is celebrated the same way in different countries of the world?

Just a warning though about our last two challenges. 

 The second last (penultimate) one is going to involve lots of research on a topic of interest to you – in other words free choice.  So start getting organized for this post that will need at least 4 paragraphs of writing.  But don’t publish it  until you see what else you need to include with the writing.

The last challenge will be filling in a survey about the blogging challenge.  There will be one survey for teachers and a separate one for students. So put on the thinking caps – good and bad points about the blogging challenge, ways to improve etc.