Miss W. and her Smartboard

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.

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

Nearly two thirds of the way through the year and I am only just starting to use more aspects of my Smartboard.  Students were setting goals and using S.M.A.R.T. as their acronym.  One group of students wanted to learn a new game, so I thought “What about nine men’s morris?”

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.

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.

Well we are now in the month of August and beginning our study on China and the Olympic Games.  But this week we have had students presenting their work on sumo wrestling that they have researched throughout this term.  Most decided to present using a powerpoint even after being reminded that this meant:

• 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? 

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?

Cross posted with “Technology in our classroom”

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