Technology in our classroom

Let’s go on a tour of some challenge class blogs.  Some blogs will have a list of students in the blogroll.  Please leave some comments on their blogs as sometimes they get missed when students are in the blogging challenge.

Mr Bogush – he always has some great topics to write about  – his students are all registered for the challenge as individuals as well

Mr Barrett – lots of images used in this blog

Mrs Yollis – lots of comments including from parents

Mrs Benjamin – only been blogging for a month

Mrs Manross – nearly all her students have registered in the challenge

Mrs Randall – very bright blog with student folios on the sidebar

Mr Baker – Fab4 have student reporters and lots of global connections

Mr Salsich – love the header

Ms Giraud – check out what each student is blogging about

Mrs Braidwood – check out their vision

Mrs Odom – 2nd year in the challenge – they exchanged ‘peeps’ with NZ last year

Doris – Venezuelan students learning English – check blogroll for monthly bloggers

Mrs Carrington – check out the class avatars

Mrs Smith (Huzzah) – 2nd year in the challenge – great posts about classroom activities

Mrs Davis – this blog run completely by students – maybe some comments needed to invite them to other blogs might be helpful

Mrs Burton – some great widgets, a superstar blogger badge and lots of videos about Web 2.0

Mrs Hogan – another blog run entirely by students who are listed under categories

Ms Cahusac – check out the Eagle Nest in Hong Kong

Image: ‘SRPS Bo’ness Steam Locos.‘
www.flickr.com/photos/26314424@N08/3657498431

Well it’s getting close to the end of the challenge.  Here in Tasmania we have about three more weeks until our end of term then we have a two week holiday.  Those students in Canada and USA are heading towards the end of the year and their summer vacation time.

Are you going to be writing posts over your holiday break?  What topics are you going to write about? Maybe you are going to be away from computers for the break.  But you still want your readers to come back after the break to read your posts.

You have your blogroll organized; you’ve visited everyone on the blog to wish them a great holiday or good luck when they finish middle school and go onto high school. But how are you going to keep them as readers and entice new readers in over your break?

Challenge this week

Begin writing a series of at least three posts on a favourite topic. 

For example, if you are like Braiden in my class last year, your topic would be motor sport.  Perhaps he could write a post about:

• famous motorcar drivers – one post per driver with links and photos to other websites
• famous races – again lots of links and images with correct attribution

At the end of each article ask a question.  Also mention what you will be writing about in your next post. To make it easy for your readers to know when you have written your post, do you have an email subscription on your blog?  Check out this post from The Edublogger to see how to add it.

But, I’m not going to be near a computer over the holidays, you say!!

Easy done!  Instead of publishing the post immediately, tell your computer when you want it published.  In Edublogs above the save/publish buttons in your write post dashboard is a ‘publish immediately edit’ button.  Use this to tell edublogs when you want your post to be published. This will make it look like you are still writing during your holidays.

Original image: ‘Late night‘  by: eden politte
http://www.flickr.com/photos/35237096015@N01/24604141
Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

If you look down my sidebar, you will see I usually have links associated with the topic my students are studying.  But where do I get these links and how do I know if they are going to be alright for my students to use?

I am thinking of looking at the topic ‘Adaptations in nature’ and have found these two links.  They look quite good as the video is made by the BBC – a reputable company and the other link includes a recommendation by a University Professor at our local university. 

Challenges this week

Would you recommend I add these to my links?  Why or why not? Leave a comment here on this post.

Write a post about an animal that you would like to see in the wild.  See if you can add a link in your post to a webcam or video and some websites about your animal.  Why do you want to see that animal in the wild rather than at a zoo?

Teachers – you might want to do something in class about verifying sources.  Do you have any other sites you use when teaching this topic to your students?

Your blog is up and running but not many people are visiting you to leave comments.  How do you attract comments and how do you find out who is visiting?

Attracting visitors:

• my students and I visit lots of other blogs and leave comments
• the name of the post is important for search engines to pick up eg Fighter jets
• making links in your posts to other blogs and websites
• having an interesting post that lots of people want to read and comment on
• making sure the class blog URL is attached to my avatar when I make a comment
• having an activity linked to the page, so the reader has something to comment on
• check out the other blogs on the class blogrolls

Check out these student posts and the comments about building your blog audience:

• Ashley
• Nicholas
• Hayden

Checking who is visiting:

There are a few ways to do this.  You could have

• a counter such as the flagcounter on this page
• a clustrmap, how to add to your sidebar
• and if 13 or older, a feedjit map

Some classes taking part in the challenge are keeping a large world map showing where their visitors are coming from. They want to know about your country and where you live.  This week’s challenge is to visit at least 10 other blogs that are new to you and leave a comment on an interesting post.

Make sure you stop by Mrs Cranford and Mrs Rush with their class blogs.

Remember the most important point as Sue Waters says

the key to blogging lies in effective reading of blogs

Original image: ‘Groveland Museum Visitors – Day 309‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/29145750@N00/1035938155
by: Steve Ryan

Released under an Attribution-ShareAlike License

One of our responsibilities as a teacher, is to make sure you are safe while using the internet, both at school and at home, by teaching you certain skills and knowledge.  But you also have a responsibility.  That is to be internet savvy and protect your online identity.

Most schools do not allow students to have pictures of themselves on their blogs and websites. If they do, parental permission has to have been granted from all students in the picture. Instead, most teachers create an avatar with their students.

Avatars can come from a website on the internet or you can use an image editor  or paint program to change a photo you have that represents you.

Activities for week 2

1. Create an appropriate avatar to represent yourself.  Save the picture as either a .gif or .jpeg or .png .  I noticed many of the challenge participants last year don’t have a blog avatar, but do have a user avatar.

• If using Edublogs, when you log-in to your blog dashboard,  there is a link under the section “Getting started with Edublogs” that allows you to upload your blog  avatar and user avatar in one easy step.  If you are a user like author or editor under your class blog, you should be able to upload to user avatar but not blog avatar.
• Once you have uploaded a user avatar this will appear wherever you make a comment.  Make sure you have your blog URL correctly written in your settings and profile.  So from now on, people will be able to click on your avatar and go straight to your blog. But if your URL is wrong, you will miss out on some interesting visitors.

2. Now create a post to explain why this avatar represents you.  If you are using a class blog, work with your teacher to create a post or page about your avatars. If you have saved the avatars on a drive at school, then your teacher could upload each of them as images with an explanation under each avatar.  Make sure your teacher also creates an avatar.

3.  If you created a Voki, then it can’t be added like an avatar.  Check out this site if you want to add it to your sidebar and check out here if you want to add a Voki to a post or page.  In both these posts, the most important thing is have everything ready in the post or page, including tags and categories before you insert the code under HTML and finally hit publish.

4. Still got time left this week, then make sure you visit the blogs of other participants. Leave me a comment here about some of the blogs you visited and what the interests were of the students you visited.

Remember the most important part of blogging is the conversation you begin and follow up on.

Any age can use these avatar sites:

• Build your wild self – top left
• DoppelMe
• Mini-mizer – top right
• The Hero Factory – top middle

From abi-station:

• Iconmaker
• Illustrationmaker
• Avatarmaker
• Moeruavatar -  on my sidebar

If under 13, sorry you can’t register for these mentioned below. But over 13, need parental or guardian permission.

• Zwinky
• Meez
• Tizme
• Wee World
• Voki

Thanks to this wiki which gave me many avatar websites to visit.

Reminder: Remember if writing a post or comment, mention challenge09 somewhere in your work.

Thanks to William, Jeff, Sam, Michael, Karen and Dale.

Did you read my previous post about Sue Waters and the birthday celebrations at the Edublogger?

You didn’t?

Maybe you would like to have ago at this activity as a pre run for the student blogging challenge this year.

Well you still have a few days until the end of February to get your post completed and linked back to the Edublogger.  These are the topics to choose from:

1. Advice for doing blog makeovers i.e. improving your blog
2. Tips for using blogs with students
3. Using tools like VoiceThread, Voki, mystudiyo, Animoto, SlideShows, Google Documents with students and embedding in blogs posts
4. Advice for writing better blog posts
5. What makes good comments or commenting tips
6. Images in blog posts
7. Tips for building blog audience
8. Ideas for getting educators involved with using web technology
9. Favorite blog widgets
10. Images generators (e.g. sign generators, newspaper generators), avatars, online graph tools etc that you can use with students
11. Advice on setting up or using class blogs
12. Tips for connecting with other classrooms

Check out the posts written by these students.

Nicholas , Mallorie , Cammie , Julie ,Karen , Ashley, Kris, Hayden and  Catie

Remember to make a pingback or trackback to the edublogger post about the birthday celebrations.

A new class means we need a new look for the blog.  This class blog is going to play an important part in your school life this year, so we need to change a few things around to make it more yours.

What about the tagline?

Do we need to look at different themes?

Hopefully by Easter, many of you will have your own blogs.  Those who don’t want their own individual blog will be added as users on the class blog – which is not as much fun as having your own blog.

So your first blogging activity is to visit the blogs of other students, keep a record of the blog themes you like and write a comment here about which theme you think we should have and why.  The name of the theme is usually at the very bottom of the blog.  The one we have now is ‘Rubrick”

On the right-hand sidebar of this blog is a list of students who have blogs.  Also go to this blog ‘Bringing us Together‘ and visit the students mentioned here.

Having now had two Skype calls, one to an individual student in Connecticut, USA and the other to a class in the Comox Valley, Canada, the students had a round robin discussion about ways we could improve our calls. We looked at four major areas.  Below are their suggestions.

Setting up equipment

• If using a webcam connected to a laptop then displayed on a smartboard, have the webcam beside the board, so the speaker can see both the camera and the class they are speaking to.
• Have a chair near the microphone for speakers to sit on.
• Have the webcam on eye-level with the speaker so they don’t have to look up or down at the webcam, which will distort the view of the class watching.
• Set up the desks of those students not at the microphone, so they can still be seen by the class you are speaking to.

Using the microphone

• Speak clearly and try to slow down your normal speech – it takes a while to work out some accents.
• Speak fluently with no small talk or swearing.  Try not to use language that is only from your country unless you explain the meaning to your viewers.
• When it is your turn to talk, make sure you know what you are going to talk about.  Try to explain rather than give a one or two word answer.
• Show confidence when speaking – this might mean a few rehearsals for some students.
• If using a desk microphone, hold it straight and speak straight into it, not swinging it side to side.

Being in the audience

• Be quiet when someone is speaking on the microphone from either end of the conversation.
• One person at a time speaking in the room at the microphone.
• Listen attentively when you are not the speaker, as you might know the answer to the question being asked by the other class.
• Don’t sit friends near each other as they will tend to distract each other when not the speaker.
• Sit where you can see and hear the conversation but where it is also easy to get up and go to the microphone.

What will we talk about?

• Have some interesting questions ready.
• Research the place where you are making the Skype call to – ask questions relating to your research.
• Have an order in which students will speak and practise your talks.
• Have some posters and pictures you can show about your own country.
• Have a guess what questions they might ask and be prepared – this means knowing a lot about your own country and state/province.
• Try to have some contact beforehand through a blog with questions and comments to help guide the conversation and prepare for the Skype.

The following were some questions my students thought they could ask …

• What’s the weather like?
• What’s the time there?
• Would you ever want to come to Tasmania?
• What do you celebrate?
• What is the population there?
• What’s your coat of arms look like?
• What does the flag look like?

Of course, we also talked about other things like school uniforms, animals, subjects at school and accents. One of my students, Laura, also wrote her post about the Skype call.

Original image: ‘Cantante‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17513020@N00/164361902
by: Julián Rodriguez Orihuela

Released under an Attribution License

Last week we had our first official Skype call with Ashley in Connecticut, USA.  It was 1pm our time and 9pm in America.  Students asked questions, talked about their pets and interests, compared schooling in USA and at our school.  It was an exciting 45 minute call with students using the webcam and smartboard to make the call more exciting at both ends.

Well, it is going to happen again!!

This time we will be talking with Grade 6 students in British Columbia, Canada.  It will be 9am Friday our time and 2pm Thursday their time. But to make the activity more interesting, we need to think about what we want to show them.  We also need to think about what questions we want to ask them.

Please comment about what you think:

• we should tell them
• they should tell us

Original image: ‘canada flag‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/78873033@N00/83616186
by: Alistair Howard    Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

WOW!  I checked our clustrmap today and at 4.30pm on Thursday 13th November we had just clocked over the 10,000th visitor. Our class blog began in March 2008 as a way of teaching students to be internet savvy as well as for them to comment on posts from both students and myself. It was the first blog created in our school and since then we have had other class blogs as well as individual student blogs created.

Posts on this blog have ranged from jigsaw puzzles to netball to fighter jets as well as creating cartoons and avatars.  Up until the beginning of September we had received about 4000 visitors. Then Miss Wyatt decided to run a world wide student blogging competition and since then the number of visitors have soared. 

I wonder how many countries you can name that have visited our blog? 

The first three students to name at least 20 different countries will get their name on my class blogroll until the end of our school year about 18 December.

Photo source