Week 5: Favourites

This week’s activities will be for a three week period, as schools in the eastern states (NSW, Victoria, Queensland) started holidays this week. The challenge will start again on Monday, 20th April (second week of our holidays – I’ll post the week’s activities, but it’s up to you if you want to do them during the holidays).

The topic for this week is favourites. This will give you a fantastic choice for your posts. You could write a post about your favourite things or you could try use some of the following tools:

• Animoto – slideshow
• Audiotool – music maker
• Cool Tools for School
• Kizoa – video maker, slideshow creator, collage builder
• Padlet – sticky notes
• Popplet – mindmap
• Thinglink – multimedia
• Voki – audio tool

Can you think of any more Web tools that we could use? List them in the comments section below.

Miss W (the person who runs the Student Blogging Challenge) has created a Flipboard (like an online magazine) sharing great posts from students participating in the Student Blogging Challenge. If you would like to get into this magazine, your posts need to include the following:

• at least three paragraphs if you are 11 or older
• an image or video or music with correct attribution (see the Resources>Creative Commons page for some links to where you can get Creative Commons music and images)
• a title that grabs the attention of the readers
• at least one link to another website so readers can build on the information you have written
• a question for readers to answer

You might like to go to Mrs Helpern’s class to see their Guess the Celebration posts – have a guess and leave a link to your blog.

Students from the following classes are looking for some visitors: Wordswork, Mrs Donofrio from Florida (USA), Ms Hoke from Springfield, Oregon (USA), Ms Chernaya from Moscow (Russia) and Mrs Hogg from Hamilton (New Zealand). Please visit them and leave a comment 🙂

Let’s Join Globally

Over the past few months, there have been many international special days or events happening. How many have you taken part in?

Activity 1 – Free Rice

I have created a Free Rice group for our class. You can read about who Freerice are and what their goals are here. This website runs a quiz, and for every answer you get correct, they donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme to help end hunger (if you’re interested, have a look at these hunger statistics – scary and sad).

I want to set you a challenge…. by the end of Week 11, I would like to see if we are able to donate 100 000 grains of rice to the World Food Programme by answering the quiz questions. You can complete as many quizzes as you like! If there are 20 questions in each quiz and 10 grains of rice are donated for each correct answer, how many quizzes do we need to do (assuming we get them all correct)? Get other people involved – ask your Mum, Dad, brothers, sisters, grandparents and friends to do the quiz (they’ll need to sign up and join WGS1008).

Select on Free Rice Group WGS1008 and Login on the left hand side. Your login is your LiteracyPro login (except for you, Blake – I’ll let you know yours in class) and your password is WGS1008. Once you have logged in, you’ll see that you are subscribed to WGS1008. Select Play from this box, so that all of the grains you accumulate will be tallied against our class group. You can choose from quizzes on English (Vocabulary and Grammar), Maths (Multiplication Tables) and Geography (World Landmarks, Identify Countries on a Map, World Capitals and Flags of the World).

Make sure you log in to our class’s group!

Activity 3 – Visiting Blogs

Visit at least 5 blogs from countries other than Australia. Leave a comment on a post at each blog. Now write your own post including the comment you have left and linking to each post you commented on.

Activity 5 – Celebrations

Think of a special celebration in one country of the world. Find three images of the event. Under each image, give a clue as to the event. On the final line, write a bit more about the event for your visitors to read. Include a link to another website giving more information on the event. Remember to include attribution for each image and perhaps a question for your readers to answer.

Activity 7 – International Blogs

Add at least five international blogs to your blogroll or links ready for a game we will hold after Easter. Ask me if you’re not sure how to do this.

Activity 9 – Earth Hour / Climate Change – Class Activity

On Saturday, 28th March, is Earth Hour. Check out their video for the 2015 event:

What could you, our class, our school do to help with the climate change problem for more than the one hour on Saturday 28 March 2015? Post your suggestions as a comment to this post, and let’s see if we can make it happen. You might like to check out some ideas listed by Earth Hour or come up with your own.

 

We were mentioned on the Student Blogging Challenge website for the writing pieces some of you completed! Well done 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might like to check out some of the students mentioned for their blogging last week (it’s towards the end of the post under the heading, ‘Previous week’s activities: Visit and leave quality comments’. These blogs could be used for Activities 3 and 7 this week.

Happy blogging!

Miss Andrews

 

Let’s Show Photos!

New week, new challenge! This week, we’ll complete the following activities from the Student Blogging Challenge:

Activity 1 – Learning About Creative Commons

We will learn about Creative Commons, so they we know when and how we can use images, videos and music from the internet. This will be a whole class activity.

Activity 2 – Remixing and Fair Use of Video

We’ll discuss remixing and fair use of video as a class. If you’re up for the challenge, small groups could create a 20 second remix using fair use.

Activity 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 – Using Images or Music Ethically

Check out the Student Blogging Challenge website for details on each activity. You need to do at least one activity, but feel free to complete more.

Activity 9 – Zoom Out from an Image

I’ll post an image above this post. You’ll need to ‘zoom out’ from it, by leaving comments. There is a really good example on Becky’s blog. So, if I posted a picture of a keyboard, the first person to comment might describe something bigger around the keyboard, like the computer or desk. The next person to comment describes something bigger again, like the room that the keyboard is in. The next zoom out could be outside the house or building. You need to read the comments of people before you and add to their comments.

 

Many of you still need to complete activities from Week 1 and Week 2.

Happy blogging!

Don’t forget you need to complete the Student Blogging Challenge activities for Week 1 and Week 2.

Other students are beginning to comment on our blog! Scotty from California commented on Student Blogging Challenge – Week 2 (you should check out his blog; he has some great stories on his page) and Abbey commented on Migration Museum – Excursion. Jess has also had someone comment on her About Me page.

Remember the theme for this week – Let’s Comment!

Let’s Comment

We have already discussed what quality comments look like and we created a set of guidelines for our class blog. You now need to write your own commenting guidelines for your own blog. Together, we will check out a post about commenting by Mrs Yollis and her students. She also shows us how to use HTML code.

Activity 1 – Commenting Guidelines

Write a post, create a video or create a poster about commenting. What sorts of comments do you want on your blog?

Activity 2 – Add a Reader Widget

Add a widget to find out where your readers are coming from. You can choose from clustrmaps, flag counter or feedjit. Or, you might know of a different option, so talk to me about it.

Activity 3 – Overseas Blog

Visit an overseas blog and leave them a comment (don’t forget to link back to your blog; you could also link to our class blog). Write a post on your blog about the overseas blog you commented on.

Activity 4 – Write your first post

You can either:

• Write a really interesting post that you think will get lots of comments. You might like to write about something you’re interesting in or about a controversial topic. End with a question so that readers can leave you a comment.
• Write a post asking questions about the country you mentioned in Activity 3. Have at least six questions in your post.

Activity 5 – Family Blogging

Have a family member write a post for you to add to your blog or ask them to comment on your blog or the class blog.

 

The Student Blogging Challenge page has a lot of examples that you might like to check out. The activities are numbered differently on the Student Blogging Challenge page, but if you scroll through, you’ll find the right ones.

You do not have to complete all of these activities (you can if you want!), but I would like to see a couple completed. Please comment on this blog post to let me know what activities you have completed. Don’t forget to have a look at each others’ blogs!

Have fun!

Miss Andrews 🙂