We had a comment from Georgie at Penbank School. The school sounds really different and interesting. Have a look and leave a polite comment if you wish (there’s one about horses Lolly!).

Year 6 at Heathfield Primary School from Bolton in the UK have recently been doing their SAT tests, similar to our NAPLAN. If you want to comment on their tests you can do so here.

This time it’s all about tidying up. We all need to cooperate and collaborate to help each other reach the same stage with our blogs. By now we should all have a stable theme with a copyright free header and background. We should also have 3 extra pages: About Me, Glogs and School Work. You may have other pages but ask me first. Widgets are next. You should at least have Pages, Recent Posts, Clustr Map and Text; the Text widget should have a personal introduction. Finally, your blog needs recent content on all of the pages and you should post a comment on at least 3 other blogs (not just your close friends’ blogs). If you’ve done all this then search out someone who hasn’t and work with them til they are up to date. Deadline – THIS WEEK! As an extra, those who finish need to find a blog from overseas and post a polite comment, but again, check with me that the blog is ok to post a comment on.   🙂

The idea that games can be used for education is growing quite rapidly. Watch this video and perhaps post your thoughts. It may sound complicated at times, but it only goes for 15 minutes, so stick with it.

This Ted Talk was given by John Riccitiello and can be found here.

It’s great to see how well some of the LA19 students are doing with their blogs. Well done to Jasmine, Tahlia, Dom and Tennille who are constantly updating their blogs with interesting topics. Also, well done to Tahlia and Mason who went to the effort of getting creative with the camera to make their blogs look amazing. Great work!

Last week’s challenge was very impressive, so impressive I thought we could manage another one. This week we will be concentrating on our backgrounds or headers (those who have them). You will need to get creative with a camera. Take a creative photo and use it to enhance and personalise your background or header; if you need any help with this just ask. For the second part you have a choice. Your first option is to think of a song that has meaning for you. Write about why the song is important, what it means to you, how it makes you feel, what memory it brings back… The other option is to embed a short Youtube clip about a sporting event (AFL, Soccer…) and write a short post about it (don’t forget the attribution). If last week is anything to go by I’m expecting great things

🙂

Well, we’re a bit late to start the “Student Blogging Challenge” but there is nothing to stop us trying a few of the activities in order to hone our skills and improve our blogs. This week I want us to create and develop an “About Me” page. I found some really great examples of student blogs by following links on the Student Blogging Challenge page, four of which were Sophie, Shweta, Kyle and Molly. We also need to think carefully about our avatars. Avatars are a great way of helping people remember who we are and of protecting our anonymity. Check out the links on this page, you will need to scroll down just a little to Activity 3, then create a new avatar for yourself.

Copyright is a big issue for bloggers. We have to make sure that the images and videos we use on our blogs are truly free and appropriate for use. This means we don’t just carry out a Google search for just any old image, but we look for ones that we are allowed to use. Any resource (text, images, video, music etc.) that we find online and we wish to use needs to include a creative commons license, similar to the one on this page below the Clustr Map. Two great options to make sure you are safe include Creative Commons Search and the Advanced search option on Google where you can select the right license type (look for the cog).  A great place to find more information, and where some of this is taken from, is The Edublogger by Ronnie Burt. Have a read and scroll down to find Where To Find The Goods to find links and information on appropriate resources.

Check out the Class News page to see some of the excellent art we created on the iPads. The work was influenced by the Blush album cover and was made using the Brushes app. To find out why we did this have a look at The Big IT Project on the Staff Room page.

For anyone thinking of starting a blog with their class this has got to be a great start. Creating a paper blog can be a fabulous introduction to blogging, or it can be used as a stepping stone for younger students before they get to the higher years where they begin blogging on the internet. This excellent post from Karen McMillan is well worth a read.