Most weeks in the student challenge, I have asked you to visit lots of other student or class blogs and to leave comments on posts you have found interesting. For this week’s challenges, you are going to need to know how to create links in your posts. Check out Sue Waters post on linking in the Edublogs tutorials.
Linking or creating hyper-links is one of the most important aspects of blogging. When you link to a website or another blog post, it shows your readers that you have searched the internet for information to back up what you are writing about on your post.
Here are some great examples of linking in a post:
Nicole in a mystery story she wrote included links to some drinks mentioned in the story
Teacher Jane includes many links for scuba diving and animals you would see when diving
Miss W (me) wrote a post for her students about resources to use when studying a family relative who was a member of the armed forces in Australia
So here are the challenges for week 8.
Students and classes
Activity 1 – return to previous posts
Go back and read some of your previous posts.
Where could you add some links to improve your post?
- Perhaps the place you would most like to go to
- If Miss W came to your community
- Family celebrations
- Animal migration
Activity 2 – More checking your posts
Have you included a link back to the student blogging challenge on every post you have written as part of the challenge activities? If you haven’t then that is probably why Miss W hasn’t mentioned your blog on the ‘Visit these’ posts. Here are some simple links if you want to use them.
Activity 3 – My favourite post
Write a post about your favourite musician or food or computer game. In the post include at least three links and an image, as well as the link back to this post on the student challenge blog. Remember to give attribution for the image. Linking is like giving attribution for the information used in your post.
Activity 4 – Own choice post
Write a post about anything that you are interested in. Might be books, games, knitting, genealogy, Pokemon, WOW, a certain animal – you get the idea! In your post include a link to a blog about your topic, a link to another website about your topic and an image with attribution.
Remember if searching using Google, put in your keyword in the search area, then when results appear, on the left side of the page under ‘Everything’ click on more and then blogs. Now only blogs on the topic should be on your screen.
Activity 5 – Student challenge meme
What is a meme? It is like a viral video – one person creates the video, puts it up on youtube, others see it and blog about it or like it on Facebook. Suddenly it has millions of viewers.
A blogging meme relies on those people who are tagged responding to the post. If you are not interested in the topic, you probably won’t write about it. A couple of memes I have taken part in early in my blogging life were: Worst job ever meme and 7 things you don’t need to know about me.
One of the students in the March 2009 blogging challenge took part in a meme. She tagged me and here is my post.
The student blogging challenge meme is:
Describe one of the things you have done in life, that make you glow with pride.
Meme rules:
First paragraph: mention this is a student blogging challenge meme and include link back to the meme post.
Last paragraph: Make links to those students or classes you are tagging.
You may tag up to ten people but only two from your own class – tag students from other countries to make sure the meme is spread globally.
To begin this meme I will actually write a new post so you can see how it should be done.
Original image: ‘070314linked‘
Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
PDF 
I am a middle school teacher who retired in 2012 but still loves teaching. In my spare time I enjoy tracing my family history and helping others with their genealogy as well as chatting with my friends around the world. But most of all, I enjoy travelling and visiting new places.
I finally figured out why we haven’t had any traffic or comments, even though we have tried to comment each week on many blogs: I didn’t link back to the challenge. Silly me. I have added the links to our blog posts for the parts of the challenge we tried to complete. I don’t expect any back-tracking, and I’ll need to explain to my students my error. It’s still been fun, and we have so enjoyed reading all the class and student posts. Thanks, Sheri Edwards
http://eagleswrite.edublogs.org/2011/05/01/challenges-by-us/
I like this weeks blogging challenges.
You guys are amazing.
How am I able to fiqure out which ones are ping backed and which are not?
Utau,
When you get a comment from a person, it reads just the way they wrote it to you.
But if it is a pingback, it often begins with [...] lots of writing here then another [...]