Technology in our classroom

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.

Part of this challenge is to make you better bloggers and commenters. Another part is to let you begin to develop a positive digital footprint in the world of technology. We hear so much in the papers and news reports about teachers and students being suspended for misusing Facebook or MySpace or leaving comments on Twitter.

Challenges week 8

1. What is included in having a positive digital footprint? When should you start using your proper name and photo of yourself rather than an avatar? Who is responsible for showing you how to be internet savvy? What information do you include on profiles when you register at a website?  Write a post about your own digital footprint.  Give examples of where you can be found on the web.
2. Look at your blog.  Have you been replying back to your commenters and thus continuing the conversations?  Have you got out of your comfort zone and commented on lots of other blogs written by classes and students around the world? Or are most of your comments only from class mates and your teachers? Check out the comments on this post and see where the use of threaded comments is handy when carrying on a conversation. With Edublogs, threaded comments is a plug-in for supporter blogs – remember to take part in competitions with The Edublogger and win 12 month supporter badges like Lauren, Abbey and Jessica. Write a post about your commenting habits after 8 weeks of the challenge.
3. If you have only had comments from your class mates and teacher, then leave a comment on my blog and I will get back to you over the next couple of weeks.
4. To get you visiting other blogs, do the following activity – Count out three.  On the September participants page, click on the blog of either a student or a class.  This is count out one.  Now go to the blogroll of that student or class and click on a link to another person. This is count out two. Finally when on that blog, click on the link of someone in that blogroll.  This is count out three. Now leave a comment on that person’s blog.  Hopefully this is not a blogger you have already commented on.  Try this activity at least three times.

Sorry I am a day late getting this challenge out to you. But I have been thinking about what to use that I haven’t used in previous years.  Then I got an email from Sue Waters from The Edublogger saying she was off on holidays to Cairns and Uluru. 

Then it hit me: Holidays and Vacations.

Challenges week 7 – you may complete as many as you wish

1. What would be your fantasy holiday?  Remember we have readers from age 7 looking at our posts so be careful how you express yourself.
2. What is your favourite holiday that you have already been on? Why is it a favourite?
3. If you had a choice of a country to holiday in, where would it be and why? Check out the destination tab at Lonely Planet.
4. Find a travel blog about that country or place and leave  a comment there.
5. Visit the Lonely Planet blog and leave a comment on a post.  Remember to be savvy and only use your first name. If you do this activity, come back here to tell me which post you commented on.

Remember to tell your readers answers to questions beginning with who, where, when, what, how, why.

• Who did you go with?
• Where did you go?
• When did you go?
• What was the best part of the holiday?
• How did you get there?
• Why did you go to that place? etc etc

Include some links so your reader can visit the place you went to or want to go to. Try to find some images of the holiday or vacation place.  A map would be handy for your readers. Remember to include the attribution for the images.

Image: ‘Uluru/Ayers Rock‘
www.flickr.com/photos/97708873@N00/2562614982

Could all classes and students check the information on the September Participants page? I want to update this page so it reflects only those people who are actually taking part in the challenge.  I have already deleted some who have not started the activities or who had given me a wrong URL.

Some classes I don’t know what grade or subject you are because it is not mentioned in your ‘About’ page or equivalent. I have usually left a message in red next to these blogs. I will be checking each class blog this week and if there is no post relating to the blogging challenge activities or the class blog is not linked on your blogroll, then I will be taking your class name off the participant list. All classes should have started now, six weeks into the challenge, especially if you registered early.

Some students might be mentioned more than once on the list because you registered more than once.  Perhaps you added extra information when you registered a second time.  If you are linked more than once, please leave me a comment telling me which numbers are you so I can delete one of them next week.

 Look at these stories told in pictures only. 

Which one do you think was most interesting? 

Were there any you didn’t understand?

Leave a comment here at this blog post.

Lauren,   Co-Connections,  Cierra,  Sean,  Josh,   Alyssa,  Kayla,   lilracer,  Ashley, Kenzy, Kylie,   Kaela, roadrunner

We even had fairy tales in pictures: Hansel and gretel  Humpty Dumpty

 A rebus by Nikki 

Matt shows those students taking part in the commenting section of the challenge one way to keep a record of how you are improving your comments.

 Here are some great posts, polls and comics from students and teachers who took part in BAD  2009.  Remember to take part in any polls you find on student blogs.  This will help them write another post about the results in a month or so.

Ashley linked correctly to the BAD website with her going green post

Changing weather comic

Viandematrix took a global look about this topic

Danny  completed more than one activity

Make sure you check out Kira’s poll on her sidebar

Take this poll from Room10 

Chevy  quickly made changes after a comment about linking

Kylie did three activities including a comic and poll

Even a bookworm has great ideas to help control climate change

Members of the Eagle’s Nest want to survive – Eagle4   Eagle2  Eagle13  Eagle5

Hallie - great research – two sources linked

Freddo – tips for what we can do

Hannah has family arguments about this topic

Lisa versus the scientists – remember to be polite if arguing against Lisa’s post

Even musicians worry about climate change

Fantastic presentation of the topic by Jessica.

Jade used and linked to lots of sources for her information.

Abbey and how climate change relates to her blog theme.

Unusual writing style from Fred and George

Even the teachers wrote some great posts – Doris included a video, Miss B. linked cigarette butts to climate change, Miss W. looked at power creation in her state

Many students in the blogging challenge have done some great research on this topic for their BAD post. There will be a post highlighting some of their posts over the weekend.

But having lived on this earth now for just over half a century (this makes me old …lol) I have started noticing in the last decade or so, the many changes in our weather and climate patterns, especially how they affect me.

When growing up as a child, winter was always cold and wet, maybe some snow on the nearby mountains and this happened in June, July and August.  But recently we have been having more rain in September and October. We even had snow on Mt Wellington in  September.

Trees that used to begin flowering early in September, are now flowering in October – no good for my hayfever.

Here in Australia, we are hearing more about hurricanes, cyclones and tsunamis in the last few years.  Maybe this is the media being more interested in the topics but they are certainly in the news more often.

Having travelled to many countries over the last twenty years, I really appreciate getting back to Tasmania and the little town where I live.  We have a reputation as a state that is clean, green and very little crime.

My greatest wish for Australia regarding climate change is that something is done at the summit in Copenhagen later this year.  I would like to see electricity in our country to be clean and green – hydro power (Go Tasmania), wind power (Go Tasmania), solar power, tidal power and as a last resort nuclear power.

Image: ‘Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep‘
www.flickr.com/photos/27639319@N00/2935143781

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

I hope every participant in the student blogging challenge is going to be a BAD writer on Thursday 15 October. 

 ”Why be a BAD writer on just that day?” you ask.  “Isn’t Miss W shouting when she uses capital letters in blogging?”

No, she isn’t. She is using an acronym.  BAD stands for Blog Action Day.  Visit their website to find out more about the origins of this day in the blogging calendar.  On this one day in October thousands of bloggers around the world will be speaking as one voice on the topic of climate change. If you register your blog, you can add a badge to your sidebar to prove you are taking part in this world wide event.

What can I write about climate change?

Perhaps you can visit these websites and get some ideas:

• Check out world CO2 emissions here at breathing earth. Which countries have decreased their emissions over the last two years?  How did they do it?
• An index of great sites to visit about climate change.
• Visit Canadian eco-kids site.
• Excellent climate change games to play and learn from.
• Visit the BAD partners’ websites to get ideas.

 

Week 6 challenge:  Theme is climate change

1. Write a post about climate change – how it affects you personally; what you can do about it at school, home or local community;  how it is affecting certain parts of the world etc.  Remember to show you have researched the topic by linking words to other websites where you found some great information that you mentioned in your post.
2. Create a series of comic strips about climate change.  Look at the sidebar on this linked blog to find some great comic websites. Maybe create a superhero relating to climate change and tell his/her story.
3. Create a climate change story using images. Remember to give attribution as many other bloggers might visit your blog over the next few weeks.
4. Create your own quiz about climate change using MyStudiyo or another quiz site you know. Make sure the questions and answers relate to climate change and show you have researched well.
5. Maybe you would rather find out what people consider are the important aspects of climate change – create a poll or survey about the topic.  PollDaddy or SurveyMonkey are good sites to do this.

Whatever you do as an activity, remember to make a link back to the BAD site, so they can come and visit your blog.  You might word it something like this:

As part of the student blogging challenge, I wrote a post for BAD 2009 on the topic of climate change.

Already half way through the challenges and so far we have:

• written an ‘About me’ page – week 1
• created and uploaded an avatar for the blog and/or comments - week 1
• decided on a commenting guideline for our blog – week 2
• added clustrmaps and other widgets about the world – week 2
• learned how to create post categories – week 3
• added interesting links on our blogroll – week 3
• added widgets about the local area – week 4
• added a translation widget – week 4
• commented on international blogs – week 4
• learned how to comment back to commenters – week 4
• learned how to add HTML code to add a link in a comment – week 4

All this in just 4 weeks!!

The main part of blogging is the conversations you create through either the posts or the comments. We are doing quite well with the comments but now it is time to show communication through writing your posts.  Most posts so far have just been written words.  Some students have added an image but was it an image they had taken themselves or did they use one from the web?

How to do this??

Add links to other blogs you have read which gave you the idea for your post. For example, Abigail tagged me to write a post about inspiring music.  When I wrote the post, I made sure there was a link in it, that took my readers back to Abigail’s original post. If you get tagged for this activity, make sure you link back to the original post of the person who tagged you.

Often when I send you back to read a post written by Sue Waters at “The Edublogger” I will attach a link to the post I want you to read – eg how to insert a link into a comment.

As well as inserting links, adding an image will get your reader involved.  Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.  But if you use an image that is not owned by you personally, you have to tell your readers where you got the image from.

For example, in my post about why I wasn’t at school last Tuesday, I used images I had taken, so I didn’t have to say on the post where I got the pictures.  But I could have said they belonged to me and were copyright to me. So if you wanted to use one of them, you would have to get my permission.

There are many websites where you can get images to use in your post that are creative commons images.  This means they have been licensed so you can use them in certain ways.  There are a few different creative commons (cc) licences so you need to check especially if you want to slightly change the image. Here is a link to a previous post I have written about sites for images.  Included in that post is a link about how to add an image if using Edublogs. You must give attribution when using a cc image.  I have done this two ways: I have linked the image to the URL where the photo was found and at the bottom of this post, I have given the title of the image and where I found it.

Challenges week 5

1. Write a post about one of your favourite interests.  In this post include at least two links to great websites or blogs that are also about that topic.
2. Visit one of the image sites and choose a great image. Write a post about that image and remember to include the attribution. This means you have told readers where you got the image from.  Look at the URL for the image – this does not mean Google search images but the original site where the image was put on the web.
3. Choose five images which, put together, tell a story without any writing from you. Remember to choose a great title for this post. Remember also to give attribution for the images.

Image: ‘Headstrong’ www.flickr.com/photos/95572727@N00/2259228179