blogging

Classroom Blogging

July 31, 2011July 31, 2011Mrs S2 Comments

Trying again with this post as I am having some technical difficulties with saving drafts. At the moment I can’t save a draft post so I will be trying to get this done in one go. No time for reflection or changing my ideas.

I have been blogging with my classes since last year but up until now have only been using a “closed” blog. The blog was on our school intranet site and only accessible to those who could log in. I have a small group of children who have very much enjoyed adding comments to this blog and it has been very exciting to see them log in from home, after school and at the weekend, to add to our blog. I share the teaching load of my class and I have two days on class while my teaching partner is there for the other three days. The blog and other sections of our intranet have been invaluable to me in terms of keeping in touch with my class at all times and also in showing them that Mrs S is always around and interested. Funnily the children notice little things – they will see the time stamp for when a blog post was added and tell me I should have been asleep.

We will still be using our intranet pages but it is time to branch out so we have started a class blog. Our blog is an Eudblogs blog and it a very new. This blog will give my class the chance to share their work with a larger audience and over time I hope to have my students authoring our posts and managing our comments. The other side of the blogging work is to encourage all my class to visit other blogs to add comments and join in global conversations.

Our blog has two posts and already some very thoughtful teachers from around the globe have helped us on our way with comments. Thanks very much to the hashtag #comments4kids for that! I have had one very keen student go home and get a comment from her parents which I am eagerly waiting to share when I am on class next week. We are off to a great start.

Are you blogging with a class?

How has it changed your teaching?

Trialling Windows Live Writer

April 28, 2011April 28, 2011Mrs SLeave a comment

I have just downloaded Live Writer and this is my first try at adding a blog post via this program.

I have read about Live Writer and just decided to give it a try.

The ribbon interface gives it the same feel as all the other Microsoft Office products and the layout on the screen is nice and clear. I am not sure whether there is any advantage at the moment with using this and I just used the preview tab and got a very garbled preview that linked this post with a previous post so will now publish this short trial post and see the end result.

Hi Ho Hi Ho It is Back to Work I Go

February 17, 2011March 1, 2011Mrs SLeave a comment

Empty Classroom photo © 2008 Max Klingensmith | more info (via: Wylio)
Wow, the school term has started and I already feel like the holidays were in the dim, dark past. I have met my new class, dealt with countless computing issues, found out my timetable and started fiddling with my class intranet page.

Four roles in three and a bit days is how my work has panned out this year. Two days on a grade 4 class, three grade 5-6 classes for Library, ICT/enrichment support and a tiny bit of ESL work will keep me busy.

Today was my first day with my class and they were great. Listened well and had a go at all sorts of little activities throughout the day. I am very fortunate to have taught about half the group last year as well so settling in to routines has had a little head start.

Computer headaches in abundance but hopefully they will ease as the term progresses. It feels great when I can help sort out some of these and frustrating when I have to say wait until one of our ICT support technicians are in the school.

I have already been able to use some of the ideas I picked up from the Teacher Blogging Challenge to use on my class intranet page. Thanks very much to all the organisers of this great online PD.

Awash in the sea of Twitter

February 5, 2011February 5, 2011Mrs S13 Comments

The last part of the Kick Start Your Blog has been all about building readership of your blog. Again there is lots to take in throughout the challenge post and I will be going back over it more than once while I work through some of the suggested ways of inviting readers to your blog.

Joining Twitter was one of the suggestions and so I have jumped on in. I had never explored Twitter before but was very aware of it’s existence.

Signing up was easy and I stuck with the name of my blog for my username.

@MrsSOnline

Now comes the hard part. It is all new and a bit overwhelming so I am working my way through The Edublogger’s Guide to all thing Twitter. I have downloaded TweetDeck and will be finding my way about it over the next few weeks.

Another site I will be exploring was linked to from The Edublogger’s guide is called Blog Tips and there are a series of posts for me to work through.

Can you recommend any other good Twitter or TweetDeck for beginner sites?

Widgets and The Case of The Vanishing Widget

February 2, 2011February 2, 2011Mrs S1 Comment

Kick Start Your Blogging has moved on to looking at widgets. Widgets? The name always makes me smile and I had to go looking for the origins of the word.

Wikipedia gave me this:

“Widget” entered American English around 1920 as a generic term for any useful device, particularly a product manufactured for sale. In computer use it has been borrowed as a shortened form of “window gadget”, and as such was first applied to user interface elements during Project Athena in 1988. The word was chosen because “all other common terms were overloaded with inappropriate connotations” and – since the project’s Intrinsics toolkit associated each widget with a window of the underlying X Window System – because of the common prefix with the word window.

from GUI Widget article on Wikipedia

Using Google’s define function gave me quite a varied list of definitions.

Widgets are on the sidebar of your blog and they give visitors to your blog lots of little bits of information. I tend to agree with those bloggers who have stated that too many widgets are not a good idea. I think that they then become a distraction from the writing in the posts. The students I am blogging with are using Kidblog and they do not have any sidebars to play with. I am still not sure if this will be good in the long run but it has been good for keeping the focus on the post writing and commenting at the start. My more capable students have already explored adding widgets within their posts using the HTML tab of the post editor.

On to my ‘sad’ tale……

I explored my widgets when I revisited my neglected blog at the start of this challenge. I changed my theme and then wandered through the various tabs on the sidebar of my admin page and found the widgets. At this stage I do not think that I had upgraded to a pro blog (I got sick of the ads so I upgraded). I was rearranging my widgets and I dragged the Categories widget out of Sidebar 1. It vanished and I now have no idea where to find the widget to put it back. I got some great advice from Miss W on where to look but as you can see in the picture it is nowhere to be seen.

I still have categories on my posts and in the admin sidebar but no category widget. I do not think it matters as I have added a search widget and tags widget and the categories still show in each individual post.

I have a pages widget because my theme did not add the pages across the top of the blog and I think I will keep my avatar widget at the top as it is the same as my comments avatar.

On my class blog last year I found it very useful to add two time widgets. One was set for our own timezone and the other was set to the timezone of our absent classmate. The grade 2-3 class were then able to look and think about what their classmate might be doing. It generated some very interesting discussions as they were able to compare times and activities. I think I got the widgets from TimeandDate.com and used a HTML box to add them to the blog’s sidebar.

The widgets on my blog will probably change over time as I explore more but they definitely add to the experience.

Organizing and Editing Photos

January 31, 2011February 2, 2011Mrs S3 Comments

I have always loved taking photographs ever since buying my first camera which was a Kodak Instamatic. I bought myself an SLR when I started working which was well used until it was traded for a film compact camera for travelling. When digital cameras arrived I wanted one but had to wait a while to be able to afford to buy one. I settled on a Ricoh Caplio G3 and I think it cost me around $600. I still have it and it is still used even though I now own a digital SLR.

Having had a camera for a while I have lots of photos. The ones before digital came along are all in boxes. I have some that are on mini floppy discs that I can no longer access because of the file format but luckily they were taken with a film camera so that I have the negatives. I have some on CDs and I have thousands on my computer!

I need a way to organize these or I would never find anything. I could have just used the Windows software that came with my computer or the software that was provided with my camera but instead I choose to use Picasa.

Picasa is a software download from Google. It is free and I find it very useful because it ties in so well with my Gmail account, Online Picasa Web Albums and Blogger. To use my images in my blog I am able to easily find, edit and upload to my online albums and then use the link to feature to add to my blog.

One thing I use often is the crop feature in Picasa. I take my photos using the highest setting on my camera and that is way too large for using on the web. This means I can crop heavily and still have a large picture. Even with a zoom lens there are some things that you just can’t get close enough to to get a good tight shot.

Before

After

When I upload using Picasa I have the option of uploading the full sized image or just uploading a smaller file for the web and the the uploader takes care of the resizing.

I can use other programs to resize my image as well but if I do this I will always make a copy of my image first so that I do not ever resize the original. MS Picture Manager is one program that I use.

IrfanView is another picture viewer/editing downloadable program that is highly recommended but I have not explored it yet.

Exploring Poll Daddy

January 29, 2011Mrs S4 Comments

Poll Daddy was another site recommended in Challenge 6. I have created my first poll.

This is a site that requires you to sign up and asks in the terms and conditions that you be over 13. I teach primary students and have come across this often. I am hoping to continue blogging with some students and they will definitely want to add some media to their posts so I think I would like to compile a list of sites I would feel comfortable encouraging them to use on their own. I do not feel comfortable allowing students to sign up for sites that have an age requirement or ask for an e-mail from school. It seems to contradict discussions we have about internet safety and etiquette if I then tell them it is OK to ignore this statement and lie about their age.

What do you think?

Is is OK to ignore the age requirement of these sites?

Can you suggest good sites for primary/elementary aged students?

Images in Posts

January 24, 2011Mrs S13 Comments

Kick Start Activity 5 – Beginner gives us all a great introduction to using images in blog posts and discusses that very touchy issue of copyright.

Oh, how many classes have I been in where when the idea of copyright is raised I get challenged with “Why is it on the internet then?” The discussion continues along the lines of – it has been put out there and therefore I can use it. I also see adults modelling this to students as they troll through Google Images and save or print images with no acknowledgement of where they came from. More and more I also talk with students who will justify their actions with a statement about it “only being for educational purposes”.

I like the way Sue’s post focuses on acknowledging sources and is so cut and dried with the statement in Step 1.

You can’t just use any image you like in a blog post.

Why? Because unless stated otherwise the law automatically grants full “copyright” over any creative work a person makes. Sue Waters, Kickstart Activity 5 – Beginner- Enhancing Posts with Images

It isn’t about ‘not using images’ it is about ‘how we use images’.

This is the statement I would like to have on a recording and may be on posters near all computers in our school so that I do not need to repeat it.

Images are so powerful and now we are spoilt with choice as we are bombarded with images from TV, newspapers, magazines, DVDs, movies, billboards, sides of buses and – the biggie – the internet. A good image is definitely worth many words, maybe not 1000 but close. As teachers we need to model and teach correct use of images so that we can continue to be amazed, inspired and intrigued by pictures. Remember when all we could do was cut out images from magazines or travel brochures to add to projects. How things have changed!

Photo by DrJohnBullas licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

It does not take that much extra effort to get the information needed to acknowledge a source and the more we practice the better we will become. There is an extra step but we just need to insist on this step being taken when we “borrow” an image.

Alongside teaching the correct use of images from various image sources I also think we need to encourage and value our students’ own work.

Give them access to a digital camera to create the image they may need
draw, scan and upload their own work
create a digital image using MSPaint, ArtRage, Inkscape, Gimp, Kidpix, TuxPaint, Picnik, or any of the myriad of other digital creation programs that are out there.

We value their work on the display boards of our classrooms and we need to show the same value for their creations by using them in an online form as well.

What do you think?

Are we getting there?

In this post I have use one of my own photographs, a flickr image found by using the advanced google image search where I can specify – labelled for reuse – and an ArtRage image created by my daughter in 2006.

When Another Blog Says It For You

January 20, 2011January 21, 2011Mrs S1 Comment

I read plenty of blogs – some for leisure and some for work. Reading the words of so many others gives me new ideas, reinforces old ideas, shows me new things to try and gives me food for thought.

Many times I will read what is written on someone else’s blog and admire how well they have explained something. This morning this crafting blog really struck a chord with me. It is all about mistakes!

While I am working through the Teacher Challenge this was a timely post to read. When I am teaching my students I often have to remind them that mistakes do not need to be devastating as they can be what we learn the most from.

What do you think?

Mrs S Online

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