Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!

September 6, 2009 @ 11:04 am · Filed under challenge09

Welcome to the third student blogging challenge.  You are about to start leaving a positive digital footprint on the internet.

Looking through the list of participants, we have very few who have taken part in a challenge before so the activities will be new to you all.  A reminder that some activities will be for beginner bloggers or those wanting to improve their blog (BB) while other activities will be for those wanting to improve their commenting skills (BC).  Each week you can choose to do as many of the activities as you like or your teacher might choose the one they want for that week. 

Whatever happens – Enjoy your blogging!

When you meet someone for the first time or join a new class, you usually have to introduce yourself. Most blogs have a page called ‘About’ or ‘About me’ or ‘My profile’.

Activity 1.  Write or update your ‘About me’ page.  Tell your readers your first name only, a bit about your interests but remember to be internet savvy and not give out any personal details.  Check out these from students in my class - Allira , Jess and Nicholas. If you wrote your ‘About’ page last year, things will have changed – so update the information or improve the layout of what you have written to make it easier for your readers to understand.

Because Sue Waters (from The Edublogger) and I want to know which students are more interested in doing activities relating to commenting, we would like everyone to do the next activity.

Activity 2.  Write a post to answer the following questions.

  • Why did you join the blogging challenge?
  • Do you want to take part in the commenting section more than the better blogger section? Why?
  • What do you hope some of the activities include?
  • Finally, what do you hope to get out of the challenge by the end of the ten weeks?
  • If doing the commenting challenge, leave a comment on this post for me to read.

Because we can’t all meet face to face (f2f), we have to have an online identity to represent us. In the top right corner of my blog, you will see a grey haired lady.  I love wearing thongs on my feet and drinking iced tea.  So that is a picture representing me – these pictures are avatars.

Activity 3.  Create an avatar to represent you.  Visit one of the websites on this post or do as Mr Toft’s class has. You might create a blog avatar to have visible on your blog and create a different one for your user avatar which will be seen whenever you leave a comment on someone’s blog. Remember to save your avatar to your own computer as a jpeg file, then when uploading to your blog use the ‘alternative upload’ in Edublogs especially if you don’t have to crop the image.

Activity 4.  Still got more time to spare this week?  Want to win a competition run by The Edublogger?  Visit this site to read about the competition. There are 16 chances to win a 12 month Edublogs supporter subscription which will allow you to have threaded comments and other plugins.  Check out the conversation between Lauren and Sue in the comments of that post.  Lauren, one of our blogging challenge participants, has already won one of the subscriptions with her post which can be read here.

Attribution:
Original image: ‘Footprints‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51194339@N00/241620406
by: Joshua Davis   Released under an Attribution-ShareAlike License

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Challenge 2 – Create an online identity

March 9, 2009 @ 1:55 pm · Filed under Create online, Internet savvy, activities, challenge09, have-a-go, widgets

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:

From abi-station:

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

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.

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