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 $eHeight = param(‘eheight’) ||360;
print <
\$(document).ready(function() {
var pconf={
defaultContent: 'gigyaEmbed1',
defaultBookmarkURL:"$srcURL",
// showEmailAfterPost:"false" ,
UIConfig: '
Wildfire.initPost('204321', 'divWildfirePost', $gigyaWidth, $gigyaHeight, pconf); });
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.
I live in the state of Nevada,with everyone else who’s taking this blog challenge in Mrs. Trabert’s class. Take a look at my blog and you can learn about me (: and read all of my amazing stories! ♥
I live in the state of Nevada with all of the other people I go to school with. I would like if u visited blog often because I post new blogs all the time (well when I have time…..) So thank you for reading this 🙂
I live in Nevada, and I along with my other classmates are taking part in this blog challenge. I would love if you took a look my blog. I post new stories all of the time, so if you ever go to my website keep checking back for new posts.
my country is USA. I live here with pride after a awesome performence in the 2010 winter olympics. And there are alot of activities here to keep you busy.Ilive in Denver Col. and there are a bunch things to do here like go to a broncos game and elitches. Well now you know where i live live and what i like to do.
Hi everyone! I live in GA and our class is doing this class blogging challenge! I thought it would be cool to come look at your website. I love how many posts you all get overtime! I hope you come to see our class blog!
-kasey
Kasey,
Because you didn’t leave the URL of your website when you left a comment, I don’t know where to go to visit your class.
Our year 5 class are loving the blogging challenge and are having fun connecting with classes around the world. Some of us are about to start our own pages, so keep an eye on year5rc. We will be making a slide show to tell you all about Sydney this weekend.
thanks
year5rc and Mrs Miller
Hi Ms Wyatt
Do you know how I might load Voki (plural) into a post that sit in say lines of 3, rather than all down the page like I have them? Tried to do just one, but the audio file was too big to upload.
I just checked with Sue Waters and she says can’t put in columns, must be how you have done them already.
Hi Miss.W,
I have created a quiz about my area and want to put it in a post like you have done. When I copied the embedded code then added it on to a post nothing happened. Can you please help?
Thank you for your time,
Kira
Oh … I should have added that you can click on my icon here for a quick link to our class blog where you’ll find each student’s blog listed.
This has all the makings of a really fun challenge. I wanted to let others know, too, that you can find a selection of great trivia questions about Canada on each of my students’ individual blogs. We created them a little while ago when we took charge of the Bringing Us Together blog this past January. You can learn a fair bit about our country from these!
Challenge #3 Visit our country and our city.
Have a look at our blog and learn about our country and city: Argentina and Buenos Aires.
http://yearsixale.blogspot.com/2010/03/challenge-3-visit-our-city-and-our.html
Thank you
Miss Ale and Y6