It’s a very small world we live in now.

Only 220 years ago, it used to take a sailing ship about 4 or 5 months to sail from England to Australia with convicts on board. It took me 24 hours to fly from Australia to Vancouver, Canada with a short stop in Hawaii for a couple of hours. Yet it took only seconds for my class to connect to Ashley in Connecticut in 2008 when we used Skype to make a call.

Students born in the last twenty years should be taking it for granted that they will be working collaboratively with students and teachers across the world using modern technology.

So this week’s challenge is to tell the world about the area you live in – your town, your state or province, your country in general. But hopefully you will also be having international visitors coming to your blog, so you need some way of knowing where they are coming from. There will be many options of what to do this week ranging from adding widgets, writing posts, leaving comments by visiting international blogs and adding images so I am posting a couple of days earlier than usual to give you time to complete them.

Adding widgets

To tell people about your area – check out the widgetbox for weather, news and clocks
Tracking your visitors – Sue Waters from “The Edublogger” wrote a great post on this including Clustrmaps, Flag Counters and Feedjit Live. There are also revolver maps.
Translate your page in case readers do not speak your language.

When adding widgets to your sidebar, copy and paste the embed code into a text box on your sidebar.

Save then close.
If the widget is too wide, you will have to adjust the number next to ‘width’ in the embed code.
This might appear more than once in the code.

If using blogger rather than Edublogs, you might need to check out the instructions for adding widgets and images etc from Bling For Your Blog, written by a teacher in New Zealand. Thanks Allanah.

Writing posts

If I were to visit your state or province, what would be the ‘must see’ places and why? Include an image (flickrcc about Tasmania creative commons) and a link to a website.

Instead of writing, speak this time using a Voki then embed in either post or sidebar.

We have students and classes from these countries taking part in the challenge:

Australia, Canada, U.S.A, Mexico, Argentina, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Thailand, Hong Kong (China), U.A.E (United Arab Emirates), Norway and South Africa. Many of the older Australian students are refugees from other countries so make sure you read about them from their links on this blog.
Write a post asking one or two questions about each country or leave your questions as comments on the student or class blogs. eg Do kangaroos hop down the main streets in Australia? How many people live in the state or town you live in?

Images

Flickr slideshow
Take photos of your local area and put in a post as a gallery
Create a quiz at mystudiyo about your state or province. Then embed it in your blog post. Here is one I made about Tasmania.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);
my $srcURL = param(‘srcURL’);
my $text = param(‘text’);
my $gigyaWidth = param(‘gwidth’)|| 300;
my $gigyaHeight = param(‘gheight’)|| 260;
my $eWidth = param(‘ewidth’) ||300;
my $eHeight = param(‘eheight’) ||360;

print <

Send a Quiz

EOF

Which activity did you do? Did you try more than one? Which did you enjoy the most? Remember to leave a pingback or trackback in your post by linking back to this challenge post.