Spelling with flickr

Hi
Many of you have commented that you wanted to know how I did the big KIMBRA down the side of my blog. I will give you a prize if you are the first 5KP student to have completed this activity on your own blog.
Use this link to get you started or read this post if you need more help.
Good luck!

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Creating your online profile.

I have just spent some time this morning reading over the great blogs my class have been doing. They are really learning so much through this technology. Some students are embracing it more than others and that is only natural but while reading Ben’s blog this morning, I noticed something that I could use as a small teaching moment. Ben hopes that Mr Utecht will be able to teach him how to delete blogs and I know through my netvibes that Mr U. has been talking about this very idea in the middle school. So I suggest that not only Ben, but all bloggers out there, take a look at this post to see what Mr U. has to say about creating your online profile. The main message is…take what you put online seriously, really think about what you want people to know about you before you press publish because once it is out there, it really is out of your hands.

Best Blogs for October

Well I didn’t want to give it to more than one student and I didn’t want to give it to two students of the same gender but good blogging is good blogging and I had no choice but to award the October prize to Min Ji Lee and Isabella Wang for their blogging efforts this month.
The link above about good blogging includes this information:

Students need to read blogs! I cannot overstate this fact enough. If
you really want blogging to be transformative and you want it to
sustain itself as a powerful piece of the classroom environment, it
starts with reading blogs and learning about the philosophy of this
genre: critical reading, connecting and synthesizing ideas,
communicating publicly, creating, contributing, community linking and
building, and moving cyclically.

Without this step, students are more likely to see it merely as an
online equivalent to a journal (an expensive notebook) or even worse,
word processing. Teachers are more likely to hear students say “how
long”, “what should I write”, and “what do I now” if this portion is
missing. By laying the foundation, students transform their thinking,
students see this as more than an academic exercise.

So blogging is not just about putting cute widgets of meowing cats on your blog even though that is a fun way to draw attention to your site.
The prize for the best bloggers is a lunch in the middle school cafeteria next week and a free ice cream from Mrs Power. Congratulations girls and keep up the great work 5KP!

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