Miss W. and her Smartboard

• 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.

I am about to start a student blogging competition with students from many countries of the world ranging from age eight to sixteen. One of the first activities will relate to being internet savvy and not using a photo of yourself on your blog. 

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

Do your students enjoying blogging?  Do they write fantastic comments on other students’ blogs? Would they be interested in taking part in a blogging competition just for students?  It would involve 10 weeks worth of activities, one challenge each week with some bonuses for those who want to go overboard.

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.

I’m at an EDNA seminar at the moment and just learnt about a quick, easy way to give attribution to images from the keynote speaker Frankie Forsyth. Visit this website which allows you to search for creative commons images.  It also gives you the attribution which you need to include with the image on your blog. You may include it with the photo or add it under the photo.

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?

Back in May, some students in our class took part in a comment challenge, which was mainly set up for adults.  I tried to adapt the challenges to fit what students could do.  Now that you have had your blogs for a couple of months or more, what would you suggest we could use to run a competition just for student bloggers? 

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?

I get some great ideas from my Google reader subscriptions.  I now read about 30 blogs from educational and ICT bloggers every day as well as the new posts from the students in my class.  If there is a WOW idea that catches my eye, I will go to the actual blog and follow up the activity.

One from today’s reading was posted by Britt Gow and was about a “tag galaxy”.  I headed to the website and created one for my class using the tags sumo, wrestling and tournament.  In the actual flash player program you can move the sphere around but I just took a screen shot (first time ever) to use here in my blog.

I tend to forget to write on my personal blog.  I often though write on the class blog - maybe I will do some cross posting, as many of the posts would also be handy for the teachers who are just starting blogging at our school.  I don’t know how some people can keep three or more blogs going - maybe each one is for a specific purpose - not like mine which is a mish mash of a lot of things.

So here is the first cross posting:  Using WORDLE

A lot of teachers are writing about this website, which allows you to cut and paste some text into a program which will then print out the most common words used.  Maybe you could put in the blog posts you have written, and find out what are your major topics.  Here is one I did by copying and pasting the major parts of the wikipedia article on Sumo wrestling.

How could doing this help you when studying for an exam or test?

OK I just checked my posts recently written - the last eight were all to do with the Comment Challenge.  Well, now is time for a change - my next two posts will be about running a family reunion which I will be doing next weekend and also a post about wikis and student opinions about them.  I wrote a post earlier about wikis and did mention that I would do a follow up on just that - student comments ( not that word again!!) about using wikis.

I have been blogging since January, the class since February, some students since March and today I created the final blogs for individual students. Some students in the class decided they didn’t want their own blog after I mentioned a few rules.  These were:

• Both the student and I are administrators until someone does something wrong - that person will then become  an editor.  As a class we have done a lot of work on being internet safe and also looking out for each other as part of life skills.  Hopefully I will not have to demote anyone!
• They will have to write comments on blogs belonging to students in our room as well as those on our blogroll from other parts of the world.
• They will have to make sure they respond to people who write comments on their blog.
• They will have to write at least one BTN report on their blog every month and one post about something that interests them every month.  So at least two posts per month.
• They cannot publish a post until they have emailed me, I have viewed the post and sent an email back to them with my approval for publishing.
• All photos must be sourced, preferably from Flickr Creative Commons or permission must have been gained from the photographer via email and acknowledged on the bottom of the post.

Am I being too tough on my students in grade 6/7? 

I know this means a lot of work on my behalf reading posts  before they are published and emailing back to students suggestions for improvement eg spelling and grammar. But at this stage of their blogging experience, I am prepared to put in the extra time.

Today I thought it would be appropriate to jump ahead to challenge 14 - Turn your blog over to your readers.

Since beginning to blog in January this year, I have tried to get staff enthused about using Web 2.0 especially blogging in their everyday classroom activities.  Until a couple of weeks ago, I had been unsuccessful.  I had had a few staff watch me while I was commenting or writing blog posts during my time off and preparation lessons. (I usually use a computer near the photocopier as more traffic comes that way) A couple had made comments about how interesting that looked but they wouldn’t have time to do that with their other commitments.

But last week I held a blogging session after school for about an hour.  Four staff including the school chaplain turned up.  I had organized with a couple of my students to stay behind and help in the session. From my point of view it went well and the staff have been asking for more help with avatars and blogrolls which hopefully we will do next week.

But if you don’t have enough time to actually write your own blog, I would have thought every teacher could spend just 15-30 minutes once a week or fortnight in writing comments on students blogs.

So my question is:  How do we get staff involved in commenting on blogs onto which our 21st century students are putting so much effort to gain a wider audience than their own teacher?