Room 3’s Blog

Yesterday I read a post from Lyn Ross, Catch the Wave, announcing that she had moved her blog from edublogs to wordpress. Since then I have noticed some quite unsuitable ads appearing on my students’ blogs so we are also moving!

Year 8s I want to see how many of you can follow Lyn’s advice on how to move your blog and all your posts. I am copying her instruction so that you can follow them. If you don’t have an email account of your own at home you will need to do this at school using your school email.

I am also moving this blog but it won’t happen until the weekend. Can you beat me to set up your new blog? I might even have something for anyone who gets their blog setup before me!

Lyn’s Instructions

You might like to check some new blogs I have found.

My Web World This blog is written by Piers, and 8 year old from Auckland

The Other Blog One of Mr Woody’s students from Fairfield Intermediate

Room 8 Melville Intermediate There are a lot of links on the sidebar of this blog to other classes in NZ and around the world

Room 6’s Creations Year 7 & 8 from St Pius, Auckland

Flying High Room 12 & 13 Pt England School, Auckland

Mr Crosby’s Class A 6th grade class in USA who have been blogging for a couple of years

Have you found any new blogs that you think others might be interested in reading?

As some of you have been asking about the difference between tags and categories, I am doing something I have discouraged all of you doing – copying a complete post from someone else! I hope this will explain the topic clearly.

This post on using Tags and Categories on a blog was written by Michael Martin from Pro Blog Design.

In terms of coding, categories and tags are almost identical. A category system could very easily be used as a tagging system, and vice versa.

So what is it that makes the two different? And how are they best used?

Understanding and Using Categories

Categories are best imagined as a paper filing system. Each page in the system must be filed away in the appropriate drawer. There are only a set number of drawers, and so each must cover a rather wide blanket.

In your blog, categories are best used in exactly the same way:

The number of categories should be small. Resist the temptation to add new categories because a long list of them will not be read or browsed by anyone and so, is of no use.

Each post goes into one category. The categories are a way of giving a post permanent storage, just as the drawers do. You cannot put one piece of paper into two drawers, and in the same way, a single post should go into a single category.

Categories are navigation elements. Categories are not simply a way of labelling posts, they are a core element of your navigation. Your categories should be factored into your site’s architecture and navigation, and displayed appropriately.

Categories in URLs. A category represents the traditional folder system of a HTML website. Using permalinks with category names included is a good way of displaying the tiered architecture of a web site. Consider this URL – http://domain.com/category/post-name/ – If I want to return to the post’s category (i.e. go “up a level” in the architecture), I simply slash the post-name off the URL.

Complement the Categories With Tags

The most common problem with tagging is that it is used for the same purposes that categories are. Your tags aren’t categories. They are complements to your categories.

Think of tags as the colorful little page markers you might use to flick back to your favorite pages in a book. The tags don’t describe the book as a whole, instead they describe individual sections of the book.

Use the same tags over and over again. The tagging system is useless when the tags you use vary. For instance, if you have a series of posts on writing articles, you could tag them as “journalism,” “writing,” “copywriting,” or a hundred other variations. The important thing is that you choose one of them, and then reuse it on every post you ever write on the topic.

Tags do not need to be displayed in the sidebar. Tagging is not a part of your navigational structure, and so it does not necessarily have to be displayed in the sidebar. Why not simply list a post’s tags at the end of the post? The contextualisation will make them much more valuable to readers, and could even be used to replace “Related Posts,” plugins and such.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Yes I know I didn’t tell you that I was doing this but….

After reading through the blog posts that you have written this week there are two stand out  winners! Both students have really used their personal voice to communicate something that they are concerned/ interested in. Let’s see if the rest of you can reveal your inner most feelings about something that concerns you!

The winners

Holly – A post about the internet and cellphone safety

Hayley – A post about the disaster in Mynarmar

Well done to both of you. Who will be the next week’s Blogger of the Week?

Big Huge Labs has a blog header generator so that you can use any photos you have taken to create your own blog header. It works on Wordpress blogs so it should work with edublogs.

Create a custom blog header for your Wordpress 1.5 or higher blog with your own photos. Just choose or upload a photo and then download your new header graphic.

Here is the link if you want to go ahead and give it a try!

Amanda has just written about this blog which I think many of you will be interested in. Please have a look at it and maybe write about it on your own blog.

Jill’s Blog is an amazing journal of the life of the moon bears that are rescued from bile farms in China. It tells the real story of the lives that these bears live and the jobs and emotions of the amazing people who rescue them.

From leaving the bile farms through the will and dedication of Animals Asia to their rehabilitation and journey back to becoming bears – this blog share the real emotion and heart that goes into rescuing these animals.

Hey guys

I’ve just had an email from James (’Mr Edublogs’!) saying that students can now have edublogs rather than learnerblogs. That’s a bit of a pain especially since the Year 7s have just set theirs up but…

The only real advantgaes of having an edublog are the few extras – like avatars etc. If you desperately want to switch, maybe you should send James a message or leave a comment in the forum section asking if you can swap your blog rather than beginning again!

It’s up to you!

Introducing a new website aimed at students. You might want to take a look and even participate in the conversations being held there. This might be useful site for those of you who are moving on to secondary school next year.

There has been lots of discussion about realising student participation in the edublogosphere in the past year. Driven be a belief that students “should be participating in our edublogger conversations on an equal footing, as equal partners”, Clay Burrell and others have helped students set up Student 2.0, a blog that is “administered, designed, edited, and written by a global mix of students of varying ages, interests, voices, and points of view. Students 2.0 will feature content written by both staff writers and guest contributors. From Hawaii and Washington, from St. Louis and Chicago, from Vermont, New York, Scotland, Korea, and other points on the globe, these writings will be united in one central aspect: quality student writing, full-voiced and engaging, about education.

Students 2.0 is about quality over quantity – one or two posts will be published every day. Every author will write a post approximately two times a month. Every post is reviewed for quality and grammar by a student editor. In addition, guest posters will occasionally invited to contribute. No matter what, all posts will relate directly to one or more of our topics: leading, learning, and teaching. All authors and editors are students.

Authors will also have the option of writing asides: small posts with links to elsewhere in the edublogosphere. These will serve as a method for sharing breaking news while still maintaining a high quality standard.

RSS feeds will be offered for a variety of uses. There will be feeds available for posts & asides, as well as both together. We will also have a comments feed available if a lively discussion suits your taste. A conglomerate feed, containing the posts from all of our individual blogs, will also be published, for the truly insane. Of course, there will also be a master feed containing all of our fine feeds rolled into one. Eat up!

After reading Hamish’s latest blog post I decided to challenge all of you. This is to see if you can prove Hamish wrong and also to give you an incentive to continue writing blog posts during the holidays.

The person who writes the most interesting (yes they must be interesting!)  posts during these school holidays will receive a special prize. The prize is undecided at the moment but it will be something more than a canteen voucher!

Are you up to it? Can you prove Hamish wrong? I’ll be watching my bloglines account for all your posts.

Here are the links to the latest activity about some of your blogs:

Clay Burrell’s Beyond School blog

Jo McLeay’s The Open Classroom blog

The Future of Learning (Jo McLeay’s Year 9 blog) – Hamish, Jayden, Laura and Christina’s blgs get a mention here.

Room 613 Student Blogs

Support Blogging

How about leaving some comments for the the authors of the three blogs. If I haven’t added you to the Support Blogging list of student blogs, you can go ahead and add yourself!

There are some student links on some of the blogs so you may want to leave comments there too. Good luck in extending your contacts in the blogosphere.

I mentioned one of these sites to some of you yesterday but tonight I found this information, also from Louise Starkey, Teaching in the Digital Age.

I have come across a couple of interesting ideas in the last week that students may enjoy using as they grapple with the what photo/image issue. The image on the right is me as a Simpson! there are two places to develop one of these- the first Simpsonise me you develop your own choosing different options. The second site also called Simponize me, the one I used, you upload a photo of yourself and the aliens turn you into a Simpson.

Hey guys ive made a new blog ‘Blog Support’ here (instead of bombarding me with all your questions in class) you can ask all the question you like about anything from chats (skype, wengo etc.) to blogs.

Check it out!!!

http://blogsupport.learnerblogs.org