Miss W. and her Smartboard

I have now been blogging with students in grade 6/7/8 for a year and a half and this week one of my students in grade 6/7 asked me the following question.

Thanks for the comment Miss W.
Do you know who Sara is, who left a comment on my ….. work?

As I moderate all comments on blogs I administer (I use RSS feed on Google Reader to do this as I have about 200 student blogs), I  checked out the person who had left her a comment. The blog was fairly new, and was about using pianos.  I left a comment for the owner of the piano blog, asking how she found this student blog, so will see what happens when I get a reply.  Tonight I emailed the student and said yes it would be OK to approve the comment.

Also this week, one of the grade 8 students received a comment:

Great Cartoon! It would be good if you could get it published especially for kids. Alot of us take our earth for granted.  I’ve got this site:  (name of site excluded) do you think your viewers may be interested?

Again I checked out this site, even though the student had already approved the comment. I though I might use it as an example of how students could verify the suitability of the site for their readers. It was suitable despite being a site for purchasing goods.

Most students in my school are used to only getting comments from me or perhaps some of their classmates.  But next term, I would like to see a lot more of them take part in the international student blogging challenge that I will be organising with Sue Waters.  They will then receive many more comments from students around the world so my job as co-administrator on all their blogs will be a bit more frantic.

How do you deal with comments from unknown people on your class or student blogs?  What do you tell your students to do before they approve the comments?  How do they learn to recognise a spam comment?

Earlier this year, a fellow teacher convinced me to put forward a proposal for a paper to be presented at the ALEA conference in Hobart in July at Wrest Point.  This conference involves literacy and English teachers from all levels of schooling.  I have just been advised that the proposal was accepted, so I will have a one hour workshop to run on the topic:

Blogging safely in the big wide world

What do you think should be the main points I put forward in this workshop?

I would like it to be a practical workshop but am not sure if there is wifi capability at the venue (will check it out this weekend), so will firstly use an off line powerpoint presentation, and hopefully bring some students from my class last year to also participate.

I would like to include other ways of communicating online with examples such as skype, flatclassroom and 1001tales.  Do you know any links to other great examples of collaboration across the world?

Yesterday I sent out a tweet about this and received some links from Anne Mirtschin and John Pearce.

As blogging often is seen as negative, I would like the conference participants to actually get in there and start writing comments on blogs belonging to students to find out how easy it can be to get started.  Do you have any resources for how to make blogging more positive for ‘unsure about technology’ teachers? 

If you have any links for AUP policies regarding blogging, nings and wikis, that might also be handy to use at this workshop.

The reason my fellow teacher convinced me to write the proposal was that I am currently running a student blogging challenge with about 800 students and classes from 13 countries of the world participating.  I ran a similar event in third term last year and had a similar response.  From the first challenge, students asked for a blog to be created and run by their classes and teachers.  Thus was born ‘Bringing us together’.

Original image: ‘How to Design a School Website That People Will Actually Use‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/83955435@N00/299768611
by: Judy Baxter

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

As both Kris and Hayden mentioned it is important to put images in a blog post. But most of our students go to google images without realising they could get in trouble for breaking copyright.  Or they see an image in an online newspaper and think they can use that in their blog post without realising the newspaper has probably had to pay a photographer for their image.

So where can students get images that are not copyright?

They can use creative commons images from many sites on the web.  Some of these might be filtered at your school but surely one might be useful. Try out some of these links to help you with images.

flickrcc this site also shows attribution

photobucket couldn’t easily see if these were creative commons or not

behold

a flickrcc search toy

Pics4learning all free images sent in by teachers, students and friends, includes lessons to use

Sue Waters from the Edublogger has written many posts about images using flickr, width of images, inserting images into posts etc .

I have tagged some great pages in my delicious account with images such as behold,  a ning about exploring images in the 21st century and a tutorial about copyright cleared images .

This post has been written on “images in blog posts” as part of The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition!

This post has been written on “tips for using blogs with students” as part of The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition!

Sue tweeted back that I could use a previous post as long as there was a pingback, but nah …. I’ll start afresh.

I began last year using a blog myself (this one) but felt it would be a great way to get students involved in the writing process when school went back.  I spent time trying to find other Tasmanian schools that were blogging but I had no luck in that. This meant it was going to be new to both me and the computer techie guys at school and perhaps to the Education Department (our Premier does have a facebook account I think).

The department wanted me to use the sharepoint but I had heard that the blogging setup on that was not easy to use and would certainly not let the world enter easily. But that was why I wanted my students to blog – to open their minds and souls to people in other parts of the world.

So I settled on Edublogs and the steep learning journey began. After students had shown me they were internet savvy, they earned the right to their own blog if they wished to have one. I wrote posts to help the students set up their blogs;  I set up a few rules about keeping their blog; we looked at tips for other teachers starting to blog with their students; hints for commenting well and so on. 

My favourite tips for using blogs with students would be:

• Make sure they know how to be internet savvy and teach as situations arise with the blogging eg bad comments, attibution of images etc.
• Allow students as much control as possible over their own blogs with you as a co-administrator/moderator etc ready to help or intercede when required.
• Use a classblog to give students ideas of what they could write about or join a student blogging challenge (hint hint, I ran one last year and have started a new one this year to begin in March.)
• Allow students to write about things that interest them, not always work to do with school – allow their talents to shine in their blog eg interviewing people they are interested in.
• Organise with other teachers for students to comment on each others blogs – easily done through the student blogging challenge or having a great list on your blogroll in your sidebar

Well I have just been signing up more students, in classes that I teach, to the Edublogs platform.  But as they won’t be supporters, this means they will have ads appearing on their blogs. 

How can I get rid of these ads? 

Write some posts celebrating Sue Waters’ achievement of one year editing the Edublogger. Hopefully I might win one, or if I am extremely lucky two, free 12 month supporter subscriptions, then I can disable ads on more student blogs.

Check out first what the competition has already written about … notice many of the students from last year’s blogging challenge have written about their favourite widgets, and how to write great comments and how to build your audience.  So to make my chances of winning better, I will leave out those topics. (Also gives the students a great chance to win – I love reading their posts from last year ….) 

OK – what to choose now!! I could write about these topics:

Tips for using blogs with students

Ideas for getting educators involved with using web technology

Advice on setting up or using class blogs

Tips for connecting with other classrooms

Images generators (e.g. sign generators, newspaper generators), avatars, online graph tools etc that you can use with students

Just sent a twitter message to Sue – can I use a post I have already written eg avatars, using blogs with students or do I have to write a totally new post for the competition?  I suppose it would be cheating to use one I had already written but then blogging is all about linking to posts to make the conversation move along so maybe it is really being efficient to use a pre written post.

Wow, a year has passed since I first put thoughts to paper in the edublogosphere.  The time has flown so quickly.  I have made so many online friends from their comments and their help with my technological journey into Web2.0 tools.

I would especially like to thank Sue Waters, author of the Edublogger, for all her assistance in beginning blogging, using twitter, skyping and running the student blogging competition in 2008.

I would also like to thank Jan Smith, Ines Pinto, Paul Bogush and Anne Mirtschin for their help in bringing Web2.0 tools into my classroom via skype, using translation tools and in Anne’s case, face to face when her class was visiting Tasmania.

I hope some of my posts have been of help to new bloggers, as the first few months are a very steep learning curve when writing your own blog.

Now to start on year two looking at Animoto, Slideshare …….

Original image: ‘Birthday Baby‘   http://www.flickr.com/photos/35324700@N00/16815947   by: melissa  Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

A Wordle of my blog up until today’s post.  Please click on the picture to get a better view of the original.

Are you interested in learning about blogging

in the Australian situation?

Well join us at the EDNA Blogging Corner and have a go at the fortnightly challenges.

Or perhaps you have written a great post last year and want to share that with other teachers.  If so submit it to the new Blogging Corner Carnival.  If selected, it will then be published in an issue on this new website.

Some of the international readers of my blog might wonder what is EDNA?

EDNA is a free online education network for Australian educators. You can search and browse online resources from all around the world, join groups or email discussion lists.  It is available for both government and non government schools as well as vocational and adult education.  There is RSS feed from the site to make it easier to know what is happening and you can register to have your own blog and other resources to use.

The question is:

Do I start a new class blog for my new class in 2009 or do I continue with my class blog from 2008?

New blog

• Students will feel greater ownership
• Can start new blogroll with these students
• Can link old blog in the blogroll

Old blog

• Students will be able to refer to older posts
• Subscribers won’t need to change
• Change theme – need two sidebars for all links

What do you think I should do and why?

Original image: ‘Savage walk: don’t ask, just go‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61787893@N00/275371357
by: Earl

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

From September to December 2008, with the help of Sue Waters, I ran an international student blogging competition. This included about 500 students and classes from 9 countries of the world.  If you are thinking of doing something similar, then please remember to check out the following:

Advertising – How will the students know the competition is on?

I used my PLN and mentioned to teachers I was in contact with, my idea of a competition.  In my class blog, I put in a google form for students to fill in with details needed about them.  Sue Waters wrote a post in the Edublogger.  We started advertising in early August with the competition to start mid September when I went back to school.

Organization – How will the students know what to do?

On my class blog, there were separate pages for information, links to each participant and class blog, recent post feed from all participating blogs and weekly activities.  Most teachers also wrote a post in their class blogs reminding students how to get the activities to participate.

Comments – How will we connect with the students?

Over the ten week period, I tried to comment on each students’ blog at least three times – firstly to welcome them to the competition and give them the URL for the activities, then if they wrote a post about Blog Action Day and finally when the competition finished. It was easy to keep in touch using the RSS feed that Sue Waters had set up.  We also asked members of our PLNs to visit blogs and often tweeted about some very interesting posts written by the students.

Translating – How will the students comment using different languages?

We had three classes from Portugal taking part and they were mainly writing in Portuguese.  My class blog had google translator widget included and I wrote a post about how to communicate with the Portuguese students. The teacher in Portugal Stora Ines, translated all posts from either Sue Waters or my class blog that related to the competition or would be of help to her new bloggers.

Activities – What will the students write and comment about?

I had taken part in the comment challenge and felt that a challenge every week would be more suitable for students who might only get one chance a week to use a computer at school. As many of the students had been blogging less than thee months, I thought some activities about setting up their blog would be useful as well as writing and researching posts about certain topics that would be global in nature. Some of the activities included creating an avatar, setting up a blogroll and how to make new connections.

Winners – How will we choose the winners?

As neither myself or the other teachers could offer a large prize for an overall winner, the competition was run within each school.  The teacher who had registered was to organize a small prize (up to each teacher) to give to the most improved blogger and the keenest blogger over the ten week period. The winners are now on the blogroll of our new blog (see below).

After the competition – How do students keep in touch now?

Many students wanted to carry on the conversations and friendships, so after many discussion , we now have a new blog run by the teachers and students who took part in the 2008 blogging competition. If you and your class want to join us please visit the new blog and comment under the join us page.

For the second meme, I was tagged by Anne Mirtschin  I think it began earlier in December on Twitter but I couldn’t find the originator of the meme.

I have to tell you seven things about myself that you don’t need to know and then pass this on to seven more blogger/ educators.

Wow , 7 things you don’t know about me … thinking …. thinking ….

1. For 15 years I used to call round dances.  What is that you say?  In square dancing, you often have dances in between brackets called round dances.  They are similar to ballroom with waltz, two step, foxtrot, tango, cha cha, rumba and so on.  Well I had to stand up on stage using a microphone to call out the moves for the dancers. I also ran my own round dance club and taught couples how to round dance.

2.  I represented Australia Girl Guides at two different camps overseas in Hong Kong and Fiji. This was in the early 1970’s, once as a Guide and once as a leader.

3.  For many years, I was an amateur radio operator especially for Girl Guide and Boy Scout events called Jamboree on the Air, now also called Jamboree on the Internet.  I used to attend yearly gatherings over the Christmas/New Year period and stay up all hours talking to people around the world.

4.  I have eaten raw whale blubber while on a trip to Alaska.  I flew into Point Barrow with three other people from our bus tour.  The Inuit people there were holding a festival that day and asked us to join in by eating some raw blubber.  Never again.

5.  I have had a very settled life – born and lived in the same area for over 50 years – had only two paying jobs in my life – taught in only three schools since 1977.

6. I enjoy travelling and have had three around the world trips so far as part of my long service leave. Only two continents I have not visited are Antarctica and South America.

7.  While travelling, I have climbed through a pyramid in Egypt but not me in the link, rafted down a shallow river in Alaska and traced my family back to the 1600’s in Bedfordshire, England.

Remember to link back to this post when you write your post. 

Now who do I tag?  Our school chaplain Naomi, some of the teachers I collaborated with in the student blogging competition  Stora Ines, Jan , Angela  and Kimberley , a couple of local Tasmanians Ros and Angela

Original image: ‘Microphone shadows (HOTEL live)‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/64636204@N00/2284096633
by: Jorge FerrerReleased under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Original image: ‘All Gizah Pyramids‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035655291@N01/171610084
by: Ricardo Liberato

Released under an Attribution-ShareAlike License