Challenge 3 – Sept 2010 – Student Blogging Challenge

I have been checking on the pingbacks and links to blog posts from the last two weeks. You are doing a great job with the challenges. Some students are completing one or two activities while others are trying all seven or eight.

Next week, the main topic for the challenge will relate to commenting so we need to be organized ready for lots of visitors to blogs next week.

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 and adding images.

PLEASE NOTE: If you still have ads on your free Edublogs blogs, then many of these widgets will not work on your blog. If your teacher has purchased a Pro blog, then they can upgrade 50 student blogs so you can then use embed code.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. We have students and classes from these countries taking part in the challenge: Australia, Canada, U.S.A, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Thailand, Singapore, Scotland, Portugal, Indonesia, Argentina, Spain, Norway and Germany. 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?

4. Take photos of your local area and put in a post as a gallery

5. Create a quiz at mystudiyo about your state or province. Then embed it in your blog post.

<a href="http://www.mystudiyo.com/act85446/mini/go/about_tasmania">about_tasmania</a>

6. What do the road signs in your country say about you? Take photos of some unusual road signs that typify your country and include them in a post or slideshow. Thanks Miss T for this idea.

7. Next Sunday the 10th day of the 10th month of the 10th year of the century is a world wide activity day called “One day on Earth”. Check out their video here. What are you and your class going to do for this day?

One Day on Earth Participant Trailer from One Day On Earth on Vimeo.

8. Find an image with creative commons that represents your country or town. Write a post about it and its importance to your country or you.

Original image: ‘Russel Falls‘

by: Grant Williamson