Technology in our classroom

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.

Since last week, I noticed a few classes in the first list of the participant’s page now have blogrolls with student individual blogs listed on them.  Also please note the blogmeister blogs have individual blogs on their sidebar as well. 

Classes and students have been out visiting and commenting on lots of blogs and, thanks to Sue Waters from the Edublogger, we now have a teacher, pre-service teacher or student helping with commenting on all class and individual blogs.  Most people using Blogger blogs have made sure commenters can use a profile of anonymous or name/URL.

Lots of students have created blog and comment avatars, but remember, if you have uploaded it on Edublogs, then it will only appear when you comment on an Edublogs blog.  There is no way your comment avatar will appear on all blogs.

So, I hope everyone is enjoying the challenges.  We have classes and students taking part from the following countries: Australia, U.S.A., New Zealand, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Hong Kong, Canada, Scotland, Thailand, Venezuela, Greece, Chile and Basq country.  Hopefully Portugal will also be joining us soon.

Challenges this week

1. To keep up the international flavour, add at least one widget to your sidebar that shows your reader a bit about the area you live in. This could be a weather or time widget.  What else might be appropriate?
2. Visit a blog from at least five different countries not including your own.  Leave a useful comment on the blog. This might include asking a question about the area the blogger lives in. 
3. Now write a post about what you learnt about the five bloggers you have visited. What did you find interesting about their blog? Is there someone in your class you would recommend read that blog as well?
4. Make sure you have read this PDF blog post about adding a URL as a hyperlink in a comment.  Try using this in activity 2 by linking to an interesting website about your country that the blogger could visit.
5. With so many countries taking part that have bloggers writing and speaking different languages, it is nearly necessary to have some form of translator widget on your blog. Can you find a widget to translate in Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Greek and Basq?

Attribution:

Original image: ‘Welcoming‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/56013895@N00/122872445
by: fly      Released under an Attribution License

WOW! Two posts for the challenge this week.  Some students and classes took a great deal of care writing their commenting guidelines from last week’s challenge. Have a look at these:

Abbey, Mrs Yollis, Mr Miraglia, Jessica, Brad, Chris, Emily, Kelly - teachers are the same, all over the world Kelly!!

• Fab4 even made a video earlier this year about why they want to blog.
• Mrs Cousino has some tips for starter sentences when commenting on blogs.
• Mrs Bee’s class have created ’scooper tops.‘  What are these you ask?
• Mrs Thompson’s class were advertising the blogging challenge.

These students wrote posts about the comments they left:  Brad, Abby

This week’s challenges

1. How are the comments made by Brad and Abby the same? How are they different? Which comment(s) would lead on to further conversation between Brad or Abby and the owner of the blog?
2. How can you write a great post so lots of people leave comments?  Check out this post by Sue Waters from the Edublogger. Write a post you think will invite a lot of comments.
3. When someone leaves a comment, are you leaving an answer for them in your comment area, are you visiting their blog to leave a comment or are you sending an email to them if they left their email address?  Which of these three do you think carries the conversation on about the topic in your blog? Why?
4. If you want to have threaded comments in your blog, then enter this competition run by The Edublogger.  It closes soon so you might want to write this post first.

Having run three blogging challenges and having more and more participants each time, I find it fairly hard to keep up with all the commenting.  I try to comment when the student or class joins the challenge, then at least three other times throughout the challenge.

So Sue Waters from The Edublogger put out a call for commenting helpers.  She has allocated each helper with 5 class blogs and about 10 student blogs.  This will mean every class and student will have a visitor at least once a week, if not more often.  All helpers will be either a teacher, a student, a pre-service teacher or a blogger related to education.  Sue or I will have checked out their blog before allocating them to class and student blogs.

If you are interested in being a helper with the commenting, please drop by The Edublogger leaving your name and the URL of your blog.  Sue has included some hints and tips about leaving comments and email addresses to contact either her or myself if you have any queries.

We are asking each helper to comment back on this post and to leave a little blurb about themselves so you can come here to find out about your helper.

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

One of the most important parts of blogging is continuing conversations.  This means readers have to read many blogs and leave lots of comments.  If you read a great post and decide to write a similar post on your blog, then it is manners to include a link to that original post where you got your idea from.

So this week’s challenge involves visiting the ‘Bringing us Together’ blog and reading the post about heroes, taking part in the survey and leaving a comment. Some of you might want to write your own post(with a link back to the original) about someone you consider to be a true hero or heroine.  Be careful to spell heroine correctly on your post.

War often brings heroes and heroines to our notice and while I have been ill over the last few weeks, I have been watching a lot of TV on the History channel.  A person I consider a heroine is Vivian Bullwinkel and a hero is Sir Weary Dunlop.

Thanks to Miss Ale and her grade six class in Argentina for the idea for this post.

Original image: ‘Hero of the Soviet Union‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124385307@N01/95230930
by: Kees de Vos   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