It’s all about having fun, improving your blogging while connecting with a global audience!

About the Student Blogging Challenge

We’re now into our 3rd Year and 4th Challenge.

We provide weekly tasks for 10 weeks to help you connect with student bloggers in other countries and improve your blogging.

It’s a really great way to learn more about each others cultures!

You can read more about it here:

1. About the student challenge
2. Student Blogging Challenge FAQs

Your blog doesn’t have to be hosted on Edublogs to join.

Students using any blogging platform such as 21classes, Blogger, Blogmeister, Wordpress, Primary Blogger, Creative Blogs etc, can participate!

So far 44 Class blogs from 10 countries (Australia, Argentina, Canada, Hong Kong, Mexico, New Zealand, Normay, UK, United Arab Emirates, USA) have registered.

Register your student blog now!

Follow these TWO simple steps to register:

STEP 1:  Register Your Personal Blog Using the Google Form

Complete the Google Form below by adding:

1. Your Name as First name and initial of Surname
2. Your personal blog URL — for example my blog URL is http://theedublogger.com/
3. Country
4. Your age
5. A few of your hobbies  so other students with similar interests can connect with you

Please Note:

• Please register from home if you can’t see the Google Form on your school network!
• You only need to register once!
• If you are having trouble registering please leave comment on this post so we can help you.

STEP 2: Check your registration details!

Go to the March 2010 student page a couple of days after you added your details to the Google Form to check that your name and blog is on the page.

If your name is not there, it’s probably been removed because your blog URL was wrong.

Please note:

• The delay in adding your information to the March 2010 student page is because we need to check your details before adding.
• If your details haven’t been added please leave a comment on this post with your blog URL so we can sort it out for you!

Final Thoughts

Teachers and class blogs need to register following the steps in Student Blogging Challenge – Time for teachers to register their classes.

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All about having fun, improving blogging and reflective writing skills while connecting with a global audience!

Now into our 3rd Year and 4th Challenge!

We provide weekly tasks for 10 weeks that are like a buffet — you pick and choose what works best for you while we guide you and your students through the process!

Your students don’t need their own blog! You can do the activities using your class blog or by commenting on other class and student blogs.

The Student Blogging Challenge is coordinated by Sue Wyatt and Sue Waters.

You can read more about it  here:

1. About the student challenge
2. Student Blogging Challenge FAQs

Register Your Class!

We’ve opened registration for teachers to register their class to participate in the challenge which starts in March.

We’ll be inviting individual student bloggers to register next week!

Follow these THREE simple steps to register (Teachers Only!):

STEP 1:  Add your email address to our mailing list

Complete the form below.

We’ll be using this to send classes newsletters without Sue Waters or Miss Wyatt having to do separate emails.

STEP 2:  Register Your Class Using the Google Form

Complete the Google Form below by adding your Name, Class Blog URL, Country and Student Age.

Please register from home if you can’t see the Google Form on your school network.

STEP 3:  Check your class details!

Go to the March 2010 Classes page and confirm your class details are correct.

Please leave a comment on Miss Wyatt’s post or mine if you are having any problems or need to ask questions!

FINAL THOUGHTS

We’ll be inviting individual student bloggers to register next week!

Here’s some tasks that will help prepare your class blog for the Challenge:

1. Week 1 – Create A Class Blog
2. Week 2:  Set Up Your Blogging Rules and Guidelines
3. Week 3 – Add A Visitor Tracking Widget To Your Blog Sidebar
4. Week 4 – Add your student blogs to your blogroll
5. Week 5 – Add Students To Your Class Blog So They Can Write Posts

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But first let me tell you the history behind this post.

About Our Guest Blogger

Last year student bloggers wrote some amazing posts for our Share Your Tips– and win BIG! Competition and on my winner’s post I said:

The winning posts submitted by the students are so ‘must read’ that it would be an honour if they guest posted on The Edublogger.

Dominique, a Grade 8 student (13 years old), from USA decided to take me up on this offer (here’s her winning post).

She continues to astound me!

And it was a pleasure to discover that her work inspired her sister Caroline (10 years old) to:

Want a blog so much that she put it on her Christmas list!

Caroline got her Christmas wish early and is blogging at Caroline’s Corner.

J’adore les langues!

Guest post by Dominique from My Blog!

J’adore les langues, ils sont très important en notre monde. Je voudrais être fluent en francais, allemand, espagnol, italien, japonais, chinois, arabique, gaelique, and portugeuse. Et plus je ne peux pas pense de maintenant.

Today our world is so interconnected because of technology that it  is even more  important to know foreign languages.

Although I am only in my third year of taking French, I am happy that I can communicate with French speaking people in the blogosphere.

From blogging I am also alerted to the fact that there are so many wonderful languages just waiting for me to learn them, whenever I find a class blog in a different language I always wish that I could understand it, and that is something that will motivate me to learn more foreign languages.

Imagine how simple communication would be if you could speak a foreign language. And how many opportunities would be available.

Around the beginning of December I entered a podcast contest about the importance of learning foreign languages, hosted by the American Council of Teaching Foreign Languages.

I made a podcast for the contest, but unfortunately mine was not chosen as one of the finalists. Even though it did not amount to anything it was still fun to do.

On the other hand one of my friends, Adrian, made a podcast rap about foreign languages with her friend Peggy. They have actually been chosen as finalists and can be voted for on the website. I already quickly made an account and voted for them.

Here’s Adrian and Peggy’s video — I really hope that they win the middle school category for the contest which is announced this month!!!

It was a coincidence that the podcast contest was brought up in French class shortly after I conceived the idea for this post, specially written to go on Ms. Water’s blog. I think that just goes to show how important foreign languages are  becoming in our world.

p.s. When I mentioned in French, the languages in which I would like to be fluent, those are not all. There are many other languages that I would also like to learn  (I simply do not know how to say them yet in French…).

Thank you very much to Ms. Waters who allowed me to guest post this blog post on the Edublogger, it is such an honor!

Final Thoughts

Thanks Dominique for writing this guest post for us and for all your great work!

And to honor Dominique’s work I would love it if we could all leave comments on this post in different languages and include our locations!

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Here’s the previous tasks:

1. Week 1 – Create A Class Blog
2. Week 2: Set Up Your Blogging Rules and Guidelines

This week’s task is to add a visitor tracking tool to your blog sidebar.

Why Use Visitor Tracking Widgets?

It’s likely that your blog gets visitors from around the world.

But unless you find ways of displaying visitor numbers and their geographical locations, your students won’t appreciate that they’re publishing posts for a global audience.

Benefits include:

• Knowing you’re writing for a global audience is incredibly motivating for students.
• Realizing people from other countries are reading what they’ve written increases their interest, excitement and motives them to blog.
• It also provides built-in geography lessons — as most students constantly check for new visitors and enjoy finding out more about the countries where their visitors are from.

There’s numerous different types of visitor tracking widgets you can use, and it isn’t uncommon for teachers and students to use more than one type on their blogs.

Below are the most commonly used ones with instructions on how to install.

ClustrMaps

ClustrMaps is a thumbnail hit counter map widget that shows the geographical location of all visitors to your blog. Number of visitors from a location is indicated by the relative size of the dot.

Clicking the ClustrMaps thumbnail takes you to a large World map so you can examine your traffic sources more closely.

There is a ClustrMaps widget in the left hand side bar of this blog.

Here’s comprehensive ‘how to’ add a ClustrMaps to Your Sidebar Using:

1. A Text Widget – free Edublogs blogs
2. The ClustrMaps widget – Edublogs supporter blogs only

Flag Counter

Flag Counter widget shows the total number of visitors from each country next to the country’s flag. Every time someone from a new country visits your site, a new flag will be added to your counter.

Clicking on the flag counter takes you to your Flag counter page which provides more detailed charts and information about your visitors.

See it in action on Technology in Our Classroom!

Here’s how to add a Flag Counter:

1.  Go to Flag Counter

2.  Choose the maximum flags to show, number of columns of flags and your color scheme then click Get Your Flag Counter

Please Note: most blog sidebars will only fit 1 or 2 columns of flags.

3.  Copy the HTML embed code

4.  Go to Appearance > Widgets in your blog dashboard

5.  Click on the desired Sidebar to expand (so you can add the widgets)

Please note: In new blogs sidebars in your dashboard are empty and adding widgets automatically removes the default Edublogs widgets

5.  Add a text widget to the desired sidebar by dragging it from the Available Widgets or Inactive Widgets areas on the left into the Sidebar area on the right.

6.  The widget will automatically open — just add the HTML code from Flag Counter, click Save and then Close.

7.  You should now see your Flag Counters in your blog sidebar and the flags will start appearing after 24 hours.

Feedjit Live Traffic

Feedjit Live Traffic Feed displays visitors to your blog in real time and includes:

• Which city and country your visitors are in
• Which website they arrived from, if any
• Which page they visited on your website
• Which external link they clicked to leave your site, if any

Your traffic feed is updated as each visitor arrives on your site. This update occurs before it loads so each of your visitors can see their own location displayed.

Clicking on the Feedjit Live Traffic counter takes you to your Live traffic page which provides more detailed information including the countries associated with web visitors’ IP addresses, the web browser, computer operating system, and referring website.

See it in action on Technology in Our Classroom!

Here’s how to add a Feedjit Live Traffic Widget:

1.  Go to Feedjit Live Traffic Feed

2.  Click on Click here to Customize It! below Live Traffic Feed

3.  Choose your color scheme and width (ideal size for most sidebars is less than 170)

4.  Once finished customizing, copy the HTML embed code

5.  Go to Appearance > Widgets in your blog dashboard

6.  Click on the desired Sidebar to expand (so you can add the widgets)

7.  Add a text widget to the desired sidebar by dragging it from the Available Widgets into the Sidebar area on the right.

8.  The widget will automatically open — just add the HTML code from Live Traffic Feed, click Save and then Close.

9.  You should now see your Live Traffic Feed in your blog sidebar and visitor data will immediately start appearing.

Feedjit Live Traffic Map

Feedjit Live Traffic Map displays real-time visitor tracking by showing the geographic locations of the last 100 visitors to your blog.

If you move your mouse over any point on the map the city and country for that visitor will be displayed.

Clicking on the Feedjit Live Traffic Map takes you to your Live Traffic Map page which provides more detailed information.

See it in action on Technology in Our Classroom!

Here’s how to add a Feedjit Live Traffic Widget:

1.  Go to Feedjit Live Traffic Map

2.  Click on Click here to Customize It! below Live Traffic Map

3.  Choose your color scheme and width (ideal size for most sidebars is less than 170)

4.  Once finished customizing, copy the HTML embed code

5.  Go to Appearance > Widgets in your blog dashboard

6.  Click on the desired Sidebar to expand (so you can add the widgets)

7.  Add a text widget to the desired sidebar by dragging it from the Available Widgets into the Sidebar area on the right.

8.  The widget will automatically open — just add the HTML code from Live Traffic Map, click Save and then Close.

9.  You should now see your Live Traffic Map in your blog sidebar and visitor data will immediately start appearing.

FINAL THOUGHTS

These weekly tasks are part of the preparation for the next Student Blogging Challenge which starts in March.  You can read more about the Student blogging challenge here:

1. About the student challenge
2. Student Blogging Challenge FAQs

Please a comment on this post:

1. If you have any problems or questions while setting up your class blog just — I’m always happy to help!
2. If you have advice for other educators on visitor tracking widgets — would love to hear stories of how you use them with your students!

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About the Class Blog list

It now contains over 200 class blogs, sorted into different categories based on age, subject area and type of blog.

The list was set up so educators can check out different types of class blogs to get ideas for their own class blog while also making connections with classes in other countries.

I’ve worked through ALL the blog URLs in the comments on Calling All CLASS blogs…Please Share Your Blog URL With Us! to:

• Remove blogs that have been deleted or are no longer active (haven’t updated since Jan, 2009)
• Insert links to the new Class blog for educators who create a new blog for each school year
• Add any blogs missing from the list

The list contains amazing examples of Class blogs from around the World!

How To Add Your Class Blog To The List

As Calling All CLASS blogs…Please Share Your Blog URL With Us! post is now over 12 months old, and contains over 250 comments, I’m closing off comments on that post.

Off course I’m still happy to grow our Check out Class Blogs list — I just need to restart the list to make it manageable again

If you want to add your class blog to this list (or update your class blog details) leave a comment on this post to share with us:

1. Your Class Blog name(s) and URL(s).
2. Approximate age of students and are they primary, secondary or tertiary?
3. If applicable, what subject area? e.g. maths, science, language, history, English, Art, Music, ELL, ESL, & EFL
4. Country

Here’s an example of the type of information needed:

Please check the Check out Class Blogs list first before providing updated information.

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Off course I could try to explain why but it’s better to experience the power of Twitter yourself.  So I invite you to join me and others for Gr8tweets for the month of March to:

• Commit to trying out twitter for a month
• Find interesting people to follow on Twitter
• Share what you value about twitter
• See what others value about twitter
• Help build your Personal Learning Network

What’s Involved

How it will work is for each day in March you will choose your favorite “Tweet of the day” and then you will retweet it with the hashtag #gr8t.  Hashtags are often used on twitter because they make it easy to follow tweets by all twitter users with public timelines on specific topics.

It’s entirely up to you which tweet you choose; it could be the most interesting, or insightful, or humorous, or best link of the day.  It might be your own tweet or your favorite tweet by a follower.

Below is an example of a “Tweet of the Day” – see how the hashtag #gr8t has been added to the end of the tweet.

Using the hashtag #gr8t enables us to bring all the “Tweets of the Day” together for everyone to view them on the gr8tweets wiki.

Hopefully these tweets will provide great tips, links and resources while also helping you find new people to connect with.  Meanwhile drop past the gr8tweets wiki and add your details to the Who’s Playing list so you can start connecting easier with others!

If you have any questions about “Tweet of the Day” you can send us a tweet @datruss, @deacs84, @lizbdavis, @hhg, @suewaters, @budtheteacher or @dkuropatwa

How To Set Up A Twitter Account

If you don’t currently use twitter:

1. Read this information on twitter
2. Go to Twitter.com and click “Get Started NOW”

Feel free to add me to your twitter account – my twitter username is suewaters.  If you would like my help to get started using twitter just send me a tweet.  For example you might say:

@suewaters Hi Sue I am new to using twitter can you give me some advice or help me connect with others?

FINAL THOUGHTS

For latest news and updates from Edublogs follow the Edublogs twitter account.

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Currently 14 class blogs and 80 individual students blogs from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, England, Portugal and Argentina have signed up for the student blogging challenge.  Each week there will be one challenge, and some weeks will include three choices within the one challenge so that students can choose their blogging tasks based on their blogging ability.

This is a great opportunity for:

1. Students to connect with other student bloggers while improving your blogging skills.
2. Teacher to guide their students through the process of learning to blog and improving their reflective writing skills.

You don’t need your own blog! You can do the activities using your class blog or by commenting on other students’ blogs.

To join as a class or student blog you just need to complete the form at the bottom of this post.

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Here’s a couple of projects that I’m watching that might interest you.  Meanwhile if you know of any other projects that would interest educators – please leave a comment to share so we can all check them out.

Connecting Student Bloggers

Last year Miss Wyatt coordinated an International student blogging competition over 10 weeks from September to December.  It involved 500 students and classes from 9 countries of the world who participated by writing posts on class blogs, student blogs or as commenters.

By the end many expressed a desire to continue so the blog Bringing us together has been created to:

• build on the friendships begun in 2008
• encourage more students and classrooms from throughout the World to connect with each other

As a student or teacher, you can get involved with Bringing us together blog in various ways including:

1. Writing your own posts and/or comments in response to their posts
2. Using ideas from the blog for your own blogging and collaboration projects
3. Volunteering for your class to be in charge of this blog for 2 weeks (contact Miss Wyatt)

Currently Ms Smith’s class is responsible for Bringing us together and her students have written some great posts.  Haley and Sophie has asked …what kind of pet makes you go YEOW!?, Sam and Michael G. have discussed things you look for in a friend while Brianne and Brittany made me very hungry with their cooking tips for after school snacks.

Students would love to hear your feedback! Can you tell us how is Bringing us together going by leaving a comment?  (Yes – if you leave a comment I will visit and leave comment on your blog )

Skyping Around The World

Silvia Tolisano (Langwitches) is coordinating a project called Around the World with 80 schools.  She has written an excellent series of posts on this including tips for using Skype to connect classrooms:

1. Reasons for Skyping in the Classroom
2. Around The World with 80 Schools
3. Update- Around The World With 80 Schools
4. Map of Participants Around The World with 80 Schools
5. Skype Connection Rituals
6. We are Off! First Connection in Around the World with 80 Schools

You can also check out information on the Around the World with 80 schools wiki!

Strongly recommend that you consider joining this project or consider the concepts of these types of projects and how you might use them in your schools.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Would love to hear about other projects that would interest educators – please leave a comment to share.

Don’t forget if you’re interesting in skyping with other classrooms check out this page of The Edublogger and you can add your class to the list by leaving your contact details on this post.  I’m updating the list again soon!

Image by Lady Pain licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike.

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The idea of this site is to provide a central location for “how to” guides so that you can start building your own PLN based on the 5 top tools as recommended by responses of over 160 people to my online survey.  Most of the resources on the site are compiled from information from my different web sites.

Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are all about using web tools such as blogs, wiki, twitter, facebook to create connections with others which extend our learning, increases our reflection while enabling us to learn together as part of a global community. PLNs increase our opportunities to ask questions and receive help compared to our normal daily face-to-face interactions.

It’s really important that we use these tools first for our own personal learning so that we can understand how to use them with our students.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I’m thinking of expanding my PLN Yourself site to include 5 Top Handy tools because there are some everyday tools that are important to us all that aren’t necessarily as important for building a PLN.

What are your thoughts?

1. Should I add 5 Top Handy tools? Or would it be too overwhelming?
2. If I did include 5 Top Handy tools, what would your 5 choices be?

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I’ve written this post so that we can learn more about how each of us celebrates Christmas and the holiday in our part of the world.

If you get time would love it if you could:

1. Share photos of how you celebrate Christmas and the holiday in your part of the world by uploading them to your photos to Flickr tagged them educhristmas08 and, if time, add a description to each photo.
2. Leave a comment to tell us more about how you celebrate Christmas.

Below is a slideshow of the photos that have been uploaded so far:

Here in Western Australia catching up with family and friends for a meal on Christmas day is an important part of our tradition. Some people eat a traditional meal of cooked turkey, ham and roast, while others enjoy seafood and many enjoy a Christmas Day BBQ. Being summer it’s normally quite warm so people often eat their Christmas meals outdoors.

What are the Christmas traditions where you live or in your family?