WOW 2,000

While I see Adrian Bruce tweeting about almost hitting the 15,000 mark (check out his site - awesome!) I am quietly having my own celebrations!

Today I hit 2,000 visitors on my blog! WOW! That’s really scary but very exciting!!

Thank you to all you who read my blog and take part in the conversations and questions. You have up-skilled me, listened to me rant, helped me solve problems and challenged me by making me think past what I can alone - so thank you for being part of this community!

P.S. Head along to Educating The Dragon, an amazing blogger who encouraged me to get into blogging!

Comment Challenge Day 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and… 7

I am really enjoying taking part in the Comment Challenge, but I have already fallen into the trap that I was worried about when I was considering taking part - I’m already behind - what with the start of the new term and all! EEK!

But this was something I really wanted to take part in and an area I feel I need to improve on. If anything already I can see a huge benefit in taking part just in the range of blogs I have read - even if I haven’t commented on them.

So here is a recap of the last 5 days or so of the 31 Day Comment Challenge..

Day 2: Comment on a blog you have never commented on

I have commented on a couple of new blogs. In particular I really enjoyed Mentor Me’s post about music and its political motivations and themes. It seems like they have been having some great conversations along with the Intrepid Classroom about this topic. This really got to me because of my passion for music and that we are celebrating NZ Music Month too!

Day 3: Sign up to a comment tracking service

Argh… Argh… and double argh! My new found excitement for Flock I’m not sure what i’m not doing right and I need to have some more time to tinker but I can’t get coComment to work. I won’t say anything more here as this will come down to something simple I am sure!  So i’ll leave it with a - I’ll get back to you!

Day 4: Ask a question

This was great as someone came along and left a comment with a question on my blog (spot the challenge goers!) which was great to get the conversation going. I then responded with another question among my comment - it’s interesting how it is growing into a worthwhile and interesting conversation. Something I haven’t really been involved in previously. The ongoing conversations and connections are proving to be powerful and engaging already!

Day 5: Comment on a post you don’t agree with.

This one seems easier to say than do. I have also heard bit of talk about that some people have found this tricky.  I need to go exploring a bit more. I think possibly this may be easier to do once I step outside my normal educational based blogs into the realms of something else?!  Another task for this weekend!

Day 6: Engage another commenter in discussion

See Day 4 for this one. This is a part of the challenge I am really enjoying.

Day 7: Reflect on what you’ve learnt so far

I’ve pretty much covered this part throughout the blog post. I think that the most powerful things I am taking from the challenge so far is the real big shift for me in taking part in conversations in the comment section.

Also working on developing my comments past the basic and into a bit more depth, relating posts to my experience and finding out more from the blogger after their post.

One week in and I feel like I haven’t really given the challenge my all, but am looking forward to the weekend and spending a bit of time checking out some more blogs and filling in some of the gaps in the challenge. I’m hoping as next week settles down and I get back into routine I will be able to challenge myself some more!

Technorati Tags: comment08

Animal Asia 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.

Please head along and read a few if not all of Jill’s posts and educate yourself to the amazing work that these people do.

Photo from Jills Blog

Embedding Enhanced Garageband Podcasts

WOOHOO!

It’s taken a few days of experimenting and playing around and ALMOST getting it right to consult the wonderful twitterverse and be sent this link from dswaters - Music Is Not For Insects for embedding enhanced garageband podcasts into edublogs.

I was so close! My final attempt was changing the file extension to .mp4 but as I learnt above it should be changed to .m4v in order to upload to edublogs.

So in a quick nutshell…

Save your garageband to disk (to your desktop) as an aac file.

Once it’s on the desktop change the file extension by clicking on the name twice slowly - change it from .mp4 to .m4v

Go to edublogs editor and write your post in edublogs - go to the upload section, select your video, click upload then click send to editor.

It will come up looking like a link while you are editing:

But once you click publish it will turn into this (Press the play once):

Trial Enhanced Podcast

Thanks to Allanah, Dswaters, Room 13 2007 and the wonderful twitterverse for helping with this one!

Bloggers ahoy!!

Wow, I am sooo excited with how much the teachers are seeing the impact of blogging in their classes. They are, themselves, getting excited about the new horizons they have in their class through this means.  The kids are talking blogging with each other and their families - its on it’s way!

The newest class blogging at our school are a class of Yr 4’s. Please check out their blog and leave them a comment to welcome them to the blogosphere! Leave them your class blog and I’m sure they will visit you to do the same!

http://room15eps.edublogs.org

Go Al! Go MiniLegends!

The upheaval of the MiniLegends project and blog has been massive in the blogosphere over the last few days.

To read about it check out Al’s blog here…

There has been lots of chatter about this in the blogosphere - check out the wiki here to see what everyone is saying and in particular I quite enjoyed Migel Guhlin’s response to what has happened.

So honest are the responses from the MiniLegends (see comments section on Al’s Blog)…

113. mini13 - March 17, 2008
When I hurd that we arent aloud to go on my blog I was angry because I wanted to talk to my mentor, I love to go on my blog, I like my clustermap and my pitcher, IT IS FUN!!!! We can always do something on our blog.

106. mini22 - March 17, 2008
Hi Al.
When I found out that our blogs were closing down, I felt confused, sad and angry. I felt really sad because I felt that all Al had taught us had gone to waste. We had a vote on a name for our new forum. The new name for our forum is Article 13. It means Rights for the Child.I felt better with my blog in many ways.

Taken from Al Upton’s Blog Comments

Doesn’t that say enough for how effective this was to these students?

Go ahead, read Al’s blog - read the 147 (as of 18/3) comments and the feedback from the blogosphere and decide for yourself…

Welcome To The Blogosphere…

This term I began my lead teacher release days - I work 1 day a week out of the class working in classes, with teachers and students to show and guide how to embed elearning into the curriculum and daily classroom life. I have to say I am absolutely loving all the questions, inquiries, challenges and laughs that this role is giving me. I am having the chance to work with such a variety of people and students - I love it.

The teachers at school have taken a great interest to blogging and it has been awesome to work with a range of classes to get them set up with a blog - in just over 2 weeks the results have been fantastic. Thank you to all you out there in the blogosphere who have commented and supported these up and coming bloggers!

So here is a wee plug for these young bloggers - add them to your reader and you won’t be sorry, they have alot to say and show, so be part of it!

Rm 16
Rm 19
Rm 21
Rm 22
Rm 23
Rm 24
Rm 25

Our School Eco Agents - environment group

Inspiration

This week I have had the most amazing week.  I have been out of the class working alongside students and teachers to develop and embed different elements of ICT into their programs.  This weeks major focus has been on blogs. I worked alongside a fantastic teacher and 3 students for them to write their first blog posts.  I actually only really taught 2 of them.  Because then that one went on to teach another one how to write and publish a blog post, with me filling in tiny gaps along the way.

The coolest part of this was seeing the reaction from one student when, less than 5 minutes after he posted his work, he had a response.  Thanks so much to my twitter network!  This is the power of opening your classroom up to the world… and the benefits are huge!  Check out their blog here… 25eps

I have just run a session with teachers looking at lookybook.com and also Knowledge-Net. Tomorrow I am working with more classes blogging, using bubbleshare and also iPhoto.  I am absolutely loving working alongside different students and teachers in my 1 day a week and seeing the enthusiasm grow.  It’s really amazing to be sharing some of the knowledge I have gained from my PLN and sharing it on with others.

So thank you for your inspiration cause you are part of this!

To Edublog or Blogspot…

That is the question!

A few teachers are quite keen to get started in blogging. After this i’m off to play around with blogger a bit more so that maybe I can even answer a few of my own questions. I think its a good idea if at the moment we all keep to similar blogging providers i.e. blogspot or edublogs. I use edublogs (obviously) so know a bit about this on a personal level but I want to hear from the educators who use blogs with their classes, so please help me out!

Here are my questions:

1. How easy do you find your blogging portal?

2. What are the features you like and dislike about them?

3. What is your recommendation for first time bloggers/class bloggers?

4. Is there any other important information we might need to know? i.e. how simple is it to set up students as individual bloggers on a blog?  Is there another blogging provider that is better in your view?