Challenge 4 – Lots of choice

Some excellent posts being written, but I am only finding out about them by accident. Many students are still not adding a trackback or link on their post that leads back to the blogging challenge post they are writing about.

 

 

 

Improving your blog

Instead of me writing about copyright and creative commons, finding images and including attribution, I am giving you a link to a post written by Sue Waters from Edublogs as part of the teacher challenge blog. Before including any images in your posts, please read this very carefully. It is a very long post, but worth reading especially for students with their own blogs and for teachers to use when teaching about images in blogs and creative commons.

Recently I have also written a couple of posts about using pics4learning, flickrcc and google advanced search to find images. These are not as detailed as the post by Sue Waters.

Here is a link to the post I wrote in the March set of challenges. It includes two movies you might wish to use about creative commons and copyright and suggestions for posts relating to using images.

Again this week, you have freedom of choice 

• post about a topic of your own choice
• your passions, your favourites
• start a series of posts
• write your own story and have your visitors help guide the next part of the story
• an activity mentioned in a previous challenge that you didn’t have time to complete.

But if you are stuck for ideas

Check out these history, geography and languages activities I found on the web. You might like to write a post about which sites you visited.

• Teachers – take your classes on some virtual field trips with Scholastic, create a virtual mummy, gold fever in California,
• Check out a National Park in America, different deserts in USA,
• Look at the 7 wonders of the ancient world, webcams in Antarctica,
• Be a virtual tourist – choose your continent and visit through photographs and words.
• Explore an Egyptian pyramid, visit Old Sturbridge village, San Francisco Bridge virtual tour, tour colonial Williamsburg,
• Check out these museums: NMAAHC, Smithsonian for kids, Holocaust Memorial Museum online exhibits, Canadian War museum, lots of museums and collections to check out, National Museum of Australia, Australian Museum collection, Australian War Memorial,
• Look at these familiar toys – which have you or your parents played with?
• Thinkquest activity: The Homefront in World War II,
• Become a history detective with PBS
• Lots of historical activities from BBC UK – includes ancient history as well as the main world wars.
• Over 100 history games sorted by tags

Play these online games: Remember don’t click on any ads as they often have spyware and viruses

• Captain of the Jamestown Colony
• Become part of the underground railway
• Do you have what it takes to be a viking?
• What happened at the first Thanksgiving?
• Are you a good mapmaker?
• Can you solve the history mystery?
• Journey with Lewis and Clark as they travel west
• Voyage to a new colony
• Work your way through the human ages
• Practise your  knowledge of the world
• Capital cities, states and regions – just click on the map
• Geography games with Nat Geo Kids
• Word search, jigsaw and other geography games sorted by continent
• National Geographic map puzzles
• Geography jigsaw puzzles from How Stuff Works
• Games and puzzles from Ramo Games
• Using latitude and longitude from Kids Geo, ABCya, Wartgames
• Learn languages by wordsearch, hangman and crosswords
• Makeuseof suggests 7 language games

Still more time to spare

• Keep visiting other classes and students. Read their posts, answer their questions, leave comments – make connections.
• Write a post about your visits to other blogs. Which ones do you recommend others visit and why?
• Find some widgets relating to history, geography and/or languages that you could add to your blog sidebar. Remember to copy the embed code then go to your dashboard>appearance> widgets and drag a text box widget across. Paste in the code and save. If using other blog platforms, check out the “Get Help”section on this blog.

Image: ‘Postcards‘