March 2010: Challenge 6

I hope you have all been visiting other class and student blogs over the last few weeks. If you haven’t, then please make sure you have visited some during the next week. We have lots of teachers visiting student blogs to leave comments over this month and I noticed an excellent conversation happening between Mrs Yollis and Shelly. Check it out here!

Another great conversation through comments is between Saskia and her visitors, who have been students, teachers, uni lecturers. Check it out here!

Clare has responded to another teacher’s post, by writing her own and quoting some parts of the original post by Mr Watt. Check it out here! Again another fantastic conversation happening through comments.

It is great to see so many students with their own blogs participating in the challenge. Remember though, there are also some students on class blogrolls. Visit them to read their posts and leave comments as well.

What is a blogroll, you ask? Now that you have started visiting other blogs and looking at the March 2010 student list to find students with similar interests, you might start finding some blogs that you really like. You might visit these every day, but how do you remember their URL? This is where a blogroll comes in handy.

If you look near the bottom on the sidebar of this blog, you will notice I have certain subheadings such as:

blogs to visit
get help

These are part of my blogroll. Notice the subheadings or link categories are alphabetical beginning with numbers. So you will need to think about what the names are for your categories.

If using Edublogs, to create the link category headings, go to links > link category To add some links such as this blog and your friends blogs, go to links>add new. Remember to say what category you put the link under and also use http:// in front of the URL.

Just to confuse you and your teacher, there is also another heading called ‘categories’. This though, relates to the posts you write about. These categories appear in the header area or at the footer section of your post.

What are your posts mainly about?

family and friends
schoolwork
my interests
my future

You might use these as post categories. If using Edublogs, to set them up from your dashboard go to posts>categories. Why are categories and tags important when writing your posts? See if you can find out that answer over the next week.

You will notice the categories I have used for this blog are:

Information
March 2010
Type of challenge
- Beginner student
- Class
- Commenter
- Teacher
- Veteran student
Visit these

Your challenges this week

Add at least 10 blogs to your blog roll. Make sure you have at least two different link categories.
If you have taken part in a previous challenge, you also need to write a post recommending at least 5 blogs you think students and classes should add to their blogroll. Remember to give reasons why that blog should be added.
When writing posts, begin adding categories. You should only have a few of these – it is like the chapter heading of a book. Go back to your previous posts and change the category. If writing a post for the challenge, perhaps a category ‘challenge March 2010′ would be useful.
If you already have categories organized for your blog, write a post explaining why you chose those particular categories.
Make sure you have a user avatar created. Go to dashboard >users> your avatar and upload one you have created. This could be the same as your blog avatar or you might create a different one. Then whenever you leave a comment on someone’s blog, this avatar will show. Also make sure in users >your profile, you have a name displayed publicly as and that you have your blog URL on the line website. The owner of the blog where you leave a comment now only has to click on either your name or your avatar and it should take them to your blog.
If you still have lots of time to do some more challenges, then visit the blog run by last year’s participants. Leave some comments on the posts and perhaps you will also find some other links for your blogroll. Check out the categories used on this blog in their blog roll.