The first challenge for this student blogging competition will be on September 22 when students in my class return to school after their holidays. There will be three different activities each week: one for students with their own blog, another for students who mainly comment or use a class blog and finally an activity for those who have been blogging awhile and want to be challenged.
Remember if you are participating as a blogger on your own blog you must register as an individual. If you are commenting as part of a class then make sure your teacher has registered your class blog and left me a note about how many students will be participating in your class.
As you can see on the blogroll on the right, there is a separate section for the blogging competition and these are students or classes who have already registered. This blogroll will be added to as more people register.
Whenever you write a post or comment you will need to put stubc08 meaning student blogging competition 2008 as a tag or category or somewhere within your comment. That way teachers will be able to keep track of comments and posts using Technorati.
Some of the challenges will be about improving your own blog - about page, avatar, blogroll etc as well as improving what you write in your posts and comments. Hopefully you will go outside the normal blogs you write on and visit other people around the world. But remember wherever you go:
Be internet safe and savvy - do not give out lots of personal information.
Just been reading another blog and found this fascinating site, showing the most used words in the English language. The larger the word, the more use it has in our reading and writing. This would be a handy website to use for those students trying to improve their spelling as one of their goals this term.
Original image: ‘48 points‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/17936540@N00/3644912
by: Simone Petralia
Sorry guys and girls! You have to be 13 and older to be able to use this site. But might be good for some of your Olympics work or when you share your teaching lesson next term. Allows you to animate stories. I did this one in about half an hour last night.
Hey, Miss W., where’s my clustrmap? What’s happened to my Flickr photos?
Edublogs has created a new plugin for some widgets on your blog. To activate them, go to your normal dashboard, top right corner plugins> then find widget pack near the bottom of the list and click activate. You won’t have lost any dots on the clustrmap.
I noticed also that the clock I had on my blog has gone, I wonder if anyone can find it?
Have a look at this article from the BBC news desk. Make some comment about why food costs are going up all the time and why it is going to be worse in the future for many countries of the world. Look at the maps, graphs and diagrams to write a comment about food costs.
Original image: ‘Colors.‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9308488@N05/2386050904
by:
One of our activities relating to the Olympics is to create a scrapbook of highlights.
If you are 13 years or older, perhaps you would like to use this program called “Scrapblog”.
Rules still apply though, about finding images that have the correct attribution. Have a play with this program and upload your scrapblog to a post on your blog.
You might create a sport scrapblog or one about a famous athlete participating in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Well we are now in the month of August and beginning our study on China and the Olympic Games. But this week we have had students presenting their work on sumo wrestling that they have researched throughout this term. Most decided to present using a powerpoint even after being reminded that this meant:
the powerpoint was just used in the background as a reminder
you don’t have lots of words on a slide
you will have to give a talk in front of your classmates relating to the powerpoint
Students took out extra words, found more diagrams, wrote their notes on cue cards and for their first efforts, did a great job. Presentation afternoon and out came the video camera - the battery was not fully charged.
“Can we use our phones?” Go for it. So we had about four budding camerapersons videoing the events.
I was so proud of students who got up to present in front of the class for the first time this year; a student with a teacher aide organizing an interview as part of the presentation and another student whose powerpoint was run completely from the Smartboard without any help from me.
But this is now where I have no idea what to do next.
“Do you know how to download from your phones?” Cords were brought to school and hopefully tomorrow the talks will be downloaded.
But readers, what do you suggest we do next? How can we get these videos or powerpoints on the students’ own blogs? Firstly, we will need parent permission, then do we use slideshare for the actual powerpoint? But what about the videos?
Just been reading another blog and found this fascinating site, showing the 
You think you know where the oceans and continents are on a globe of the world? 
One of our activities relating to the Olympics is to create a scrapbook of highlights. 
