Student Blogging Challenge Starts!

Week 1 Introduction: Whenever you meet a new person or join a group, there are three things you will most likely do.

1. Look at the outside view of the person – do they look like the type of person you would enjoy being with?
2. Then you would go deeper by asking some basic questions about the person and their interests.
3. Finally, you would connect through shared interests.

We are going to cover those three things this week by creating an avatar to represent our outside view, creating an about me page to show your visitors the type of person you are and your interests, and searching for other students your age who also have similar interests.

Activity 1 – Creating User Avatars (Due Tuesday): Click here for step-by-step instructions and a list of great websites for creating avatars. Do not use a photo of yourself. Make sure you save your avatar as a jpeg file format no larger than 200 x 200 pixels. You might need to crop and resize. We are creating user avatars, not blog avatars.

Instructions for creating your avatar:

1. Go to MyBlueRobot.com to create your avatar
2. Click download and then press and hold to save your avatar to your iPad
3. Upload your avatar to media in your dashboard
4. Edit the picture by scaling it to 100 x 100
5. Save the photo to your iPad again
6. Upload your avatar by going to users > your avatar

Activity 2 – Creating About Me Pages (Due Thursday): Create your own About Me page or post. Be careful about how much personal information you include. Try to be creative in both your words like Felix, or by including visuals like Warrior Kat. More students to check out: Nicole, Kendall,  Tina,

• Write a poem
• Write an A-Z paragraph eg I am an athletic, yet brainy child who decided that saving the environment is one of my future goals.
• Create a video like our mentor Dinah has done
• Create a list of things people might not know about you like Ms Herring has done
• Write a Who am I like Mrs Keane or Mrs Lyttle
• Students in Ireland paired up to create their about us page, Ms Seitz’ class did the same

Below are instructions for creating your About Me page in Edublogs.

1. Login to your blog, go to the dashboard>pages>add new
2. Change the title to About Me or something similar.
3. If you only have one row of icons above the box, click on the last icon called the kitchen sink or toggle. This opens a second row which allows you to change font colours.
4. In the box, write a bit about yourself remembering to be internet safe. Make sure you have checked out the pages from other students mentioned – many of them have been blogging for a while.
5. When you have finished click the big  button on the right side of your screen – it probably says update or send for review.
6. Once you have saved your about me page, go back and delete the sample page.
7. If your theme doesn’t show pages in the header area, then you will need to go to dashboard> appearance> widgets and drag across the Pages one to your sidebar.

Activity 3 – Visiting Other Blogs (Due Sunday): One important aspect of blogging is commenting on other blogs. Classes and student participants are grouped according to similar ages. Visit some other blogs, read posts, get ideas from them, and leave a comment. Make sure you include your blog URL so they can come to visit your blog.

Are there other students your age with similar interests to you? Visit them and leave a comment on a post or their about me page.

Most students will also have a mentor who will be leaving comments. Make sure you read their comments and reply back to them. In fact, you should reply back to any interesting comments you receive – that is how conversations get started.

The above information and activities were taken from Week 1: Lets talk about us.

Happy Blogging!