Technology in our classroom

Thanks to all the visitors coming to check out our classblog.  We have recently had our clustrmap account updated and now we have been  announced as a monthly winner.  Check out this email I received.

I’m pleased to announce that you’re a winner of the ClustrMaps User Of  The Month (there are more than one this month)!  CONGRATULATIONS!!  I’ve already updated you to ClustrMaps+ status, and the ‘zoomed in maps’ (continents) will begin appearing after the next map update (normally overnight at 0400 GMT, but it also depends on there being an increase by 20% of the number of ‘dots’ shown, so it may take an extra day or two).

You’ll find your URL listed on our User of The Month page, at

 http://clustrmaps.wordpress.com/user-of-the-month/

in one of the collections reasonably near the top,

and the upgrade stays in effect for 2 years (after which I can easily guarantee plenty of great new features).

Best wishes, and thanks for being a loyal ClustrMaps user and fan!

Thanks again visitors and the Clustrmaps team!!

Looking through many of your first posts about what you want to get out of this challenge, most of you mentioned cyber conversations with other students around the world.  But how can you do that? 

Consider that at the beginning of 2008, there were over 70 million blogs in the world.  How is someone going to find yours?  I asked a similar question when I started blogging in this post.  Why is nobody commenting? What were some of the tips teachers and my readers gave me about getting comments?

Now check out this post by Priscila in Argentina about how blogging has given her a world wide audience. Check out Abbey’s blogging story and the changes she has made since November 2008 when she began blogging.

This week’s challenges

1.  Write a post or even a page about commenting on your blog. What sort of comments will you accept? Do you have to leave a name with a URL?  Are your comments moderated? Explain what this means. Will you accept critical comments about your spelling and grammar etc? 

 Mr Toft has written something on his blog about commenting guidelines to help give you an idea.

Our students from Thailand have already set blogging and commenting guidelines at their school.

2.  Visit at least 5 blogs from the participant list and leave appropriate comments.  Keep a record of what you said in a word document or discuss the comments you left  in a post.  Think about what you would like as comments on your blog before you write these. We will be looking at these again at the end of the challenge to see how you have improved with your commenting.

Remember you can see what all the participants have written in their posts by visiting this page and clicking on the link. Choose a post you would be interested in to leave a comment on.

3. Add a clustrmap to your blog sidebar.  Check here if using Edublogs. Go to enhancing your blog with widgets.

4.  Add another widget that shows your global audience.  It might be like the flag one on my classblog or if you are over 13, you could add the feedjit map as well.  Maybe you also need a translator widget to help our non English speaking readers to translate your posts. Check what other classes have as widgets to help their global audience.

Attribution:  Original image: ‘Ioni’s world DSC01433‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/99037763@N00/346630496
by: Dimitris Papazimouris  

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

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

In less than a week, we will be losing all those red dots on the clustrmap.  After 12 months, they archive the map, so I thought before that happened I would save an image of what it looks like now.

Since March 14, 2008 we have had nearly 18,000 visitors to our blog.  We have had 50 or more visitors from these countries:

Can you work out the names of ten other countries where our blog visitors have come from?