Challenge 5 – Sept 2010

Week 5 so now we are half way through the challenges for this part of the year. Most students have completed the following:

• added an avatar – both blog and user
• created an ‘About me’  page – also a post for some students
• written some interesting posts on their state or town
• commented on classmates and other student or class blogs
• added useful widgets like clustrmap, flag counter, cyber pet

This week we want you to start adding images to your posts. If students in grade 2 can learn how to give attribution for images they have used, then so can every student and adult taking part in this challenge.

So here are our activities relating to images. You must do activity 1 as this will help for the other choices.

1. Visit these blogs

• Kathleen McGeady who expects her Grade 2 students to know about and use creative commons and giving attribution when using images in their blogs. She uses FlickrCC which is not blocked at her school and gives instructions for using with Edublogs blogs. This is a great example of a tutorial type post which we would like you to complete in activity 5.
• Ronnie Burt from the Edublogs team who gives ideas for using images other than FlickrCC.
• Miss Wyatt has also written a post giving lots of other places to find images.
• Sue Waters from The Edublogger who also gives out some easy instructions on inserting images. Notice at the end of her post, she has six more posts you could read about using images in your blogs.
• Allanah King, New Zealand. Lots of hints for students using blogspot.

2. After having visited the above blogs, write two posts about using images in blogs.

• Why should we use images? How do images improve your blog? This is the first post
• How do you add images to your blog?
• Where do you get your images?
• How do you add the attribution?

Make the second post like a tutorial, so a student new to blogging could follow your instructions about using images in a post. Thanks to Mrs Theriault.

3.  Visit this wallwisher to add where you have found great creative commons images.

4. Watch these YouTube videos about creative commons and sharing your work

5. Here is a post on how to create a gallery in your blog.  Create a visual post using no more than eight images – where the images tell a story. Remember to give attribution for the images you used. No writing in this post other than the title and attribution.

6. From Bill Ferreirae – I sometime find a picture and tell students to use that picture to come up with a story. It can be about the picture, what happened before, what will happen next, etc. So, at the top of this post is the image I have chosen for you to start with. Copy the image to your post, then write the story. Remember to give attribution. If you don’t have your own blog, tell your story in a comment here.

7. A great suggestion from Dragon – We could do a “zoom” post through comments. Choose a picture, and have your readers zoom out, so to speak, by leaving comments. So maybe something simple, like a pillow, and the first commenter describes something bigger around the pillow (like a couch) and the next commenter would write about the room it was in, and the next could zoom out the window and do the house, etc.  If doing this activity, include the word ‘zoom’ in your title so I can find it easily. Remember to give attribution. Most important here is to read previous comments, so you can add to the story.

8. From EileenG Pick one, or more of your ethnic backgrounds and post about the culture. ANYTHING! Food, religions, sports, festivals, languages, etc.  Include a picture of the place in the country/region posted about.

As we still have some students and classes only on week 2 or 3 activities, I will be postponing the game till next week. To take part in the game you need the following completed:

• a blog avatar and a user avatar
• an ‘about me’ PAGE not post
• a clustrmap or flag counter widget
• at least three interesting posts – could be topics of your choice not necessarily from the challenge
• your ‘Recent Comments’ widget on the sidebar with 10 comments as the choice
• your ‘Recent Posts’ widget on the sidebar with 10 posts as the choice
• Your ‘Pages’ widget on the sidebar

Original image: ‘take a chance on me ??‘

by: Andi

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License