Best individual blog - Nadine   

Best new blog - Huzzah 

Best educational tech support - The Edublogger  

Best resource sharing blog -  Larry Ferlazzo

Best teacher blog - Inpi

Best educational wiki - Edorigami

• A question is asked  16
• Must relate to the topic  14
• Writer knows what they are talking about  9
• Been polite 11
• Given their point of view with reasons  16
• Adds information to my post  4
• Shows humour  3
• Must be positive 5

• Showing a different point of view.
• Proper grammar.
• Being very informative!
• Agreement or appreciation of a point in the post
• Perhaps when people continue the conversation between the commenters and author.
• Asking people to visit your blog
• The commenter knows what they are talking about…
• No bad language and writing that you can understand.
• You both know what your talking about and putting more posts on
• No mean comment although you can disagree with others comments and posts
• When the commenter can relate to your post.
• If they have a blog of their own, so you can go and visit it.
• When they ask a question and you can reply back to keep them coming back to the blog.
• Suggestions of where next or a different direction or……..
• Perhaps a comment or question to move the conversation on or get others responding
• Furthers the discourse and fosters community growth and connection.

Most students love creating their own avatars but many of the sites I visited courtesy of this wiki, had terms of service saying students under 13 could not register and those 13 and over had to have parental or guardian permission.

Students also love adding widgets like clocks, counters, flags, translators, maps to the sidebars of their blogs.  Again many of these are only for students 13 and older.  Yet I see many of these on blogs for students in primary grades.

Personally, I use my class blog to show students what they can be putting on their blog, but I also write a post whenever I add something new.  In this post I mention about the age minimum, mainly because my students age from 11-13 so some can use the sites and others can’t. I find the students who can’t yet use say a feedjit map are quite content with their clustrmap.  Come a 13th birthday though and  first thing that student wants is to spend time on their blog adding the new widgets.

When I check the blogrolls and widgets on my students’ blogs, I also point out if they are recommending a site where you have to be 13 or older, when the student is younger than that. I then ask them to remove that from their blogroll.

As teachers, what is our responsibility with regard to students using these sites?

Shouldn’t we leave some sites for students to use when they do turn 13?

Original image: ‘3:30 PM-Web Team Works After School‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/83955435@N00/7701596
by: Judy Baxter

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

I went into Notebook on the Smartboard and created a gameboard with the circles and joining lines.  I locked these into place so the students couldn’t move them.  Then I created some coloured pentagons for counters, but often these would go out of shape as students were moving them and I would have to start again making more counters.  What to do?

I saw a post about games for the Smartboard, written by Jim Hollis, so I decided to send an email to him. He writes the blog “Teachers love Smartboards“ and I am also a member of a Smartboard Ning. 

Within a day, Jim had got back to me with a gallery object to add to my content page on my computer.  He had never heard of the game but took the time to create a new and MUCH improved version, better than I could have created with my limited knowledge.

Many thanks Jim and your motto is very apt …. Sharing is caring.

Please visit my class blog to register and watch out for a page there called the Student blogging competition 2008 during the month of September.  Each challenge will be added ready for the students to do.

One question the students have to answer is “Have you told your teacher you are participating?”  This is so each school can award a small prize to the best blogger or most improved blogger in their school.  I don’t have the facilities to organize a world wide prize but hopefully each school could find a little bit of spare cash for a small prize.

So far we have students from Australia and New Zealand registered and a couple of teachers from the USA thinking about it for new students after their holidays.  If you have any good ideas for challenges for beginners or experienced student bloggers, please comment here and I will add them to the challenge.

The teacher from each school can tell me the winner of the prize and I will mention them in our class blog.

Any students who are taking part will be included in the blogroll on my class blog so it will be easy for students to visit each other’s blogs.

• 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? 

Original image: ‘Tassie devil’
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30805622@N00/351640307
by: Adam Tibballs

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License

Steps to follow:

1. Search for photo by putting in a tag eg sumo or Tasmania or fishing
2. Click on photo you want to use
3. Click on “edit image in-house”
4. Click on “Add attribution” if you want it included with the photo - see my picture on the right
5. Right click and “save picture as”
6. Follow normal instructions to add images to your blog

Be careful, though, when adding the attribution to the photo.  What has gone wrong with mine?

Remember, we are trying to improve our blogging skills which should include:

• having a great conversation
• improving your reading audience
• improving your blogpost writing skills
• learning about the big world out there

Please tell me some ideas you think we could include in this competition and perhaps what we could have as a prize.  Also how could this competition be judged?  What else have I forgotten?

Photo source : Learning fact and opinion by Old Shoe Woman

The Things We Steal From Children

By Dr John Edwards

If I am always the one to think of where to go next.
If where we go is always the decision of the curriculum or my curiosity and not theirs,
If motivation is mine,
If I always decide on the topic to be studied, the title of the story, the problem to be worked on,
If I am always the one who has reviewed their work and decided what they need,
How will they ever know how to begin?

If I am the one who is always monitoring progress.
If I set the pace of all working discussions,
If I always look ahead, foresee problems and endeavour to eliminate them,
If I swoop in and save them from cognitive conflict,
If I never allow them to feel and use the energy from confusion and frustration,
If things are always broken into short working periods,
If myself and others are allowed to break into their concentration,
If bells and I are always in control of the pace and flow of work,
How will they learn to continue their own work?

If all the marking and editing is done by me,
If the selection of which work is to be published or evaluated is made by me,
If what is valued and valuable is always decided by external sources or by me,
If there is no forum to discuss what delights them in their task, what is working,
what is not working, what they plan to do about it,
If they have not learned a language of self-assessment,
If ways of communicating their work are always controlled by me,
If our assessments are mainly summative rather then formative,
If they do not plan their way forward to further action,
How will they find ownership, direction and delight in what they do?

If I speak of individuals but present learning as if they are all the same,
If I am never seen to reflect and reflection time is never provided,
If we never speak together about reflection and thinking and never develop a vocabulary for such discussion,
If we do not take opportunities to think about our thinking,
If I constantly set them exercises that do not intellectually challenge them,
If I set up learning environments that interfere with them learning from their own actions,
If I give them recipes to follow,
If I only expect the one right conclusion,
If I signify that there are always right and wrong answers,
If I never let them persevere with something
really difficult which they cannot master,
If I make all work serious work and discourage playfulness,
If there is no time to explore,
If I lock them into adult time constraints too early,
How will they get to know themselves as a thinker?

If they never get to help anyone else,
If we force them to always work and play with children of the same age,
If I do not teach them the skills of working co-operatively,
If collaboration can be seen as cheating,
If all classroom activities are based on competitiveness,
If everything is seen to be for marks,
How will they learn to work with others?

For if they…
have never experienced being challenged in a safe environment,
have had all of their creative thoughts explained away,
are unaware what catches their interest and how then to have confidence in that interest,
have never followed something they are passionate about to a satisfying conclusion,
have not clarified the way they sabotage their own learning,
are afraid to seek help and do not know who or how to ask,
have not experienced overcoming their own inertia,
are paralysed by the need to know everything before writing or acting,
have never got bogged down,
have never failed,
have always played it safe,
how will they ever know who they are?

Students were asked to mention why they enjoy blogging, how it helps them and to give some hints for teachers new to blogging about to start with their own students.  I did this after a post by Sue Waters in The Edublogger asking for teachers to share their experience in blogging and tips for using with students. 

 I didn’t moderate student comments until today, so no-one could read the previous comments and get some clues about what to write.  I felt it was very interesting to see the words like fun, savvy and people appearing fairly large in the wordle.

Please also read the students’ comments here at http://wyatt67.edublogs.org/2008/06/18/students-what-does-blogging-mean-to-you/

Photo source