Welcome to the first week of activities in the 8th student blogging challenge. As at writing this first post, we have 112 classes, 748 students and 36 mentors taking part in the challenge. We cover the following 22 countries:

  • Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA – majority of students and classes from these countries.
  • United Kingdom, Russia, Vietnam, South Korea, Turkey – more than one participant.
  • Netherlands, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Taiwan, South Africa, Colombia, United Arab Emirates, Iran, El Salvador, Bangladesh, Uganda, Malaysia and Indonesia – only one participant or mentor.

Activities will be divided into three sections:

  • Blogging – check if you have done these activities before going on to the other sections. It is here where you will learn how to improve your blog.
  • Students – activities for writing posts or adding comments.
  • Teachers – activities for your classes either writing posts or leaving comments.

Let’s get started!!

Blogging

With participants from so many countries coming to your blog, you will need to have a post or page all about yourself – your interests, your favourites, your family and so on. Remember to be internet safe and not mention personal information like your last name, phone number, email, school name. Check out these great examples: Mara, Colton and Reece  A slightly different version from Nolan

If using Edublogs, go to your dashboard> pages>edit sample page or about page. Remember to rename the title. If your blog header doesn’t include pages, then you will also need to go to appearance> widgets> drag  ‘Pages’ into your sidebar.

You will also need to make sure visitors can leave comments on your blog – you might need to create a text widget to explain how to leave a comment. Check out this blog for an example: Image a Day  To know how to cheat and put this info in your sidebar, visit this post from The Edublogger and start at part 6.

If using other blogging platforms, check out the Get Help links on the sidebar of this blog. I have tried to find tutorials for improving blogs for each of the other platforms. If you know a good tutorial site leave a comment on this post and include the link. I will then add it to my sidebar.

Students

  1. You might need to re-visit your ‘About’ page and update it for this year.
  2. Otherwise check out some interesting ‘I am’ posts from students in Mrs Kelly’s class. You could write one of these for your blog.
  3. Find your name on the student participant list, check that the link works, then visit at least ten blogs with the same colour as yours and leave comments on one of their posts. Write a post, recommending at least three different blog posts to visit and why you think they are interesting.
  4. Who is your mentor? Check on the student participant list, then go to the mentor registration page and find out about your mentor. Write a post as if you are interviewing your mentor. They might visit in the next couple of weeks and leave some answers for you.

Teachers

  1. You might need to re-visit your class  ‘About’ page and update it for this year.
  2. Otherwise check out some interesting ‘I am’ posts from students in Mrs Kelly’s class. You could write one of these for your blog but instead it will be ‘We are’ as a class.
  3. Find your class name on the class participant list, check that the link works, then visit the class on either side of you. Leave a comment on their blog and some of the student blogs if linked on the blogroll.
  4. Write a post posing  some questions to be answered by the visiting classes which might come to your blog.
  5. Check out this post about commenting from Mrs Smith. What type of comments do your students leave?

Everyone:

If you have any great ideas for activities in this challenge, please leave in a comment on this post.

Remember to create a link back to this post if you have completed any of the activities where you are asked to write a post. You might copy and paste this to the bottom of the post: I got the idea for this activity from Student Challenge Blog March 2012

Image: ‘Welcome Piggies

91 thoughts on “Week 1: All about me

  1. Pingback: Getting Acquainted
    1. G’day someone,
      If you think the challenge is boring, could you please give me some suggestions of what I could include to make it less boring?

    1. G’day Jonathan,
      The challenge is all about improving your blog and making connections with students and classes around the world. Each week I set a series of activities for you to choose from around a certain topic. You write a post about your choice and link back here to the challenge. Other students might then come to visit your blog.

  2. Pingback: Getting aquinated
  3. Pingback: About Me | smi0068
  4. •Grade: 7
    •Best Holiday: none
    •Birth Month: march
    •Career Goals:none
    •Favorite Band(s): dont have one
    •Favorite Lolly:none
    •Favourite Food: hot chips with chicken salt
    •Favourite Snack:chips
    •Favorite soft drink: coke
    •Favorite Subject: PE
    •Hobbies/Sports: ripstick
    •Pet Peeve:none
    •Pets: 4 dogs 2 cats
    •Family 3 brothers 1 mum 1 dad

  5. We have been having so much fun with the challenges these past two weeks. We made avatars and even made a video of them using aminoto. The kids wrote an All About Me and we wrote a classroom one too.
    Take a look!
    Thanks for having us,
    Mrs. Lucchesi’s Fourth Grade Class
    http://lucchesip.edublogs.org

  6. Pingback: Ilaria's Blog
  7. Pingback: Basketball#1
    1. G’day Kristen,
      I couldn’t see his name on the student list so could he please re-register and where it asks teacher, he puts in my mum instead.

  8. Hi my name is Sophie, from Chilliwack,BC Canada

    I have about 20 kids in my class that are doing this challenge should I visit all of their blogs and leave a comment of just visit some?

    1. Hi Sophie,
      The idea is to first visit other students who are in the same part of the participant list as you are. If a lot of them are from your own class, then visit other students who have similar interests to you or are about your age. You don’t have to leave comments on every blog you visit, just when you find an interesting post.

  9. Hi Mrs W,
    Thanks for the honour of using my about me post as an example. I think this student blog challenge is going to be great!
    Colton

  10. Miss W,
    I’m a little behind when it comes to web 2.0 tools, and your suggestion of a survey or questionnaire for our visitors seems like the perfect opportunity to jump into embedding, but I don’t know which survey or questionnaire tool works best with Edublogs/WordPress. Do you have any suggestions as to what my students could use to embed surveys into their blogs? Keep in mind we are limited by the district as far as what the students can use (I had thought about Google docs Forms, but I think it’s blocked). Thanks!

    Mr. M

    1. G’day Mr M,
      One that I use often is Poll Daddy. Check my squirrel blog where we are asking for students to give a name to the squirrel that is touring down under at the moment. Remember when embedding the code you need to change from visual editor to HTML editor (Tab at top of post dashboard) Or students can embed the HTML code, which they should get from the website where they have created the poll, into a text widget to put on their sidebar.

  11. http://sharongarvarenglish9mw.edublogs.org/
    I visited and commented on the classes on either side of me, and I made a post on my site to welcome everyone. I’m not sure if I did the link back to this post correctly. I want to make sure that we are doing this correctly. Can you check it? Thanks so much
    Mrs. Garvar

  12. I think a great activity would be to create a Prezi which showcases facts and pictures about your school. Perhaps even upload a video and link it to the Prezi too.

  13. Hi Sue,

    One suggestion for an activity (really more of a blog maintenance task) is to have students include their class blog as link in their sidebar and make it identifiable ie Our Class Blog: Climb High! It really helps when leaving a comment on a students blog to have a sense of the classroom community too–and can lead to broader connections.

    Many thanks for all you are doing,
    Jan

    1. Gosh, I need to part of this blog maintenance… I don’t know how to create my students own blog and then add them to a blog roll. The facebook moderator sent me a link but I failed…

  14. I have several students who entered in their blog address incorrectly. How do we correct it?

    1. G’day Jake,
      If your mentor is Mrs Smith, then yes she asked for only 10 students. I think they are from a variety of classes and countries though. But visit other students as well if you want.

    2. Hi Jake,
      I left a comment on your blog. If you are looking to connect with bloggers beyond the 10 in our group, feel free to visit the students in my class by going to the sidebar of our class blog.
      Cheers,
      Ms. Smith

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