Week 3 Introduction: This week’s activities are going to be fun, but first there are some things you need to know so please read carefully.
Some students new to blogging have been writing some great posts, while others who have been blogging for a bit longer have started adding videos and images to their posts.
Yes, this week we deal with using images, music and sounds in your posts.
But can’t I use any image, music or sound that is on the internet?
No, you must use creative commons or in some cases the fair use rule.
But where can I find these images, music and sounds? Can’t I use anything when I google an image?
No, your blog is public so you must use creative commons images, sounds, music and videos.
Use creative commons images, not just any image on the net. Always include attribution of where you found the image. Compfight plugin does this for you.
Sue Waters over at the teacher challenge has written a fantastic post about images, copyright and creative commons. I would suggest you all head over there to read the post. She explains about creative commons and the licences, attribution, how to find images for your blog and how to upload images to your blog. This might be very wordy for some students, but Sue uses lots of images and how to do sections in her posts.
OK I want to use some legal creative commons images and music in my slideshow.Where can I go to get them?
Do you have compfight plugin for Edublogs? Follow the instructions from Sue Waters’ post.
Maria, a mentor from 2014 and also helping this year, created some lists of tools to use with images and audio.
Other places to get images and music:
You will need to work out how to get the attribution to put on your posts. Check Sue Waters’ post to get more help and more places for images. This post from Edublogs explains how to add media in all its forms to your blog posts or pages.
Images
Music and sound effects
Jamendo, CCMixter, post with 14 websites for music, post with 20+ websites for music, post with 55+ sites with sound effects
Activity 1 – Creative Commons: Watch this video about sharing work and write a post about what you learned. Include words such as attribution, share alike, licences and derivatives to show you understand what the video was about.
Activity 2 – Create a Slideshow or Gallery: Create a slideshow or photo gallery about your interests to add to your about me page or as a separate post. Your final slide should include attribution for each image.
Activity 3 – Maintain Your Blog: Follow the guidelines below to improve the quality of your blog.
1. Reply to comments on your own blog
2. Visit other student and class blogs – leave some quality comments
3. Start using categories and tags with each post you write to make it easier for people to find posts on certain topics. For example, you could use the category “Student Blogging Challenge” for each post you publish from these activities. You could then use “Week 3″ as the tag for this week to organize your posts. Make sure you have the tags and categories widgets in your sidebar.
4. Have at least five other student blogs linked on your sidebar – students from other classes and schools – not your own. We will need this for a game we play in a couple of weeks.
Try to have a few different headings like
- My Blogging Friends
- Other Class Blogs
Having lots of links to student blogs from other countries will help spread the game.
Here are the instructions for adding links to your sidebars.
Don’t forget to comment on this post to let me know that you have completed all of the activities for the week!
The above information and instructions were taken from StudentBloggingChallenge.org
