I’ve been reading a few posts lately about testing time occurring in May in many countries. Here in Australia, we have our NAPLAN testing in literacy and numeracy for all students in grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. Many students have been learning how to write in a persuasive style as this is what the piece of written work will assess.
So this week’s challenges will relate to persuasive writing or something to do with testing.
I asked last week for some more ideas for challenges, so I will also be using them.
Students and classes
Activity 1 – It’s a testing time
Write a post using a persuasive style of writing. You might like to use glogster to create a poster. Maybe wallwisher to get ideas from other students before you write your post.
Topics might include:
- That mobile phones should be used in classrooms
- That all students should have a personal blog from Grade 6 onwards
- That all classes should have a class blog
- That national or statewide testing has no valuable purpose for the student
- A topic of your own choice
Activity 2 – Review time
Janis wrote a post about how April is review month ready for the big exams in May. Check out her suggestion for a post. This might be good for those students who have taken part in more than one of the student challenges last year and this year.
Activity 3 – Learning time
Think about something important you have learned outside of school – remember we should all be life long learners not just learners while at school. How did you learn it? Why is it important to you? Who or what taught you about it? How has this learning helped you in your life?
Activity 4 – Widget choice
Since you have been visiting lots of different student blogs, you will have noticed many widgets on sidebars of student blogs. Write a post about the widgets you have added to your blog and why you chose them.
Remember some widgets are for students 13+. Also if adding a music widget, try to have it on silent when your blog opens, or your visitors might be blasted with loud noises when they visit your blog.
Activity 5 – My regular visitors
Have you noticed in your comments, there are certain people visiting often? Or maybe, you have only had one or two visitors. How can you increase the number of visitors to your blog? How can you make sure they leave a comment and start conversations about your posts? Perhaps you could interview one of your regular commenters like Mikayla did in my class.
Activity 6 – Wordle your blog
Have you created a wordle from your blog? Check out the one Abbey created for one of our previous activities. If you have problems embedding your wordle, ask Abbey some questions or try to get rid of some of the extra spaces in the embed code. Remember if you do a printscreen and save as an image, you still need to give attribution to the wordle website.
Activity 7 – Internet safety
The students at our school recently had a drama performance by Bamboo Theatre company from Sydney who were touring around Tasmanian schools. Both students and staff found much interesting information about being safe on the web. Part of it was facebook and your settings. Have you had lessons on being internet safe? Do you use a certain program at school that teaches these things? Write a post about how you learn about internet safety.
Privacy on Facebook – these links might be more useful for the older students taking part in the challenge. How many of you have used default settings when joining Facebook?
Look at this post to see how much can be seen with default settings and how it has changed over the last five years. Here is a newspaper article showing the 170 different privacy settings you could be changing. Here is a tool that can scan your facebook settings and give you hints about where to make some changes. The links to these posts are from a post written by Jenny Luca. An interesting infographic about Facebook. Some statistics from the Facebook press room.
Now that you have checked out these posts, have you made any changes to your Facebook settings? Write a post about your use of Facebook and how it might be affecting your digital footprint on the web. Check out this post by Derek who I found last year by using the count out three game.
The game is on …. The game is on ….
The game is called count out three. Those students who have taken part in a student blogging challenge before will have already played this game. But we have many different students taking part in the challenge this year, so you should be visiting different blogs for the game in 2011.
Here are the instructions:
- click on a blog on the student list – count one
- now click on a blog from their blogroll – count two
- finally click on a blog from that blogroll – count three
Leave a comment on an interesting post at this blog.
Do this activity at least three times and finally, write your own post saying which blogs you visited and what posts you left a comment on. Why did you choose that post? Remember to include a link back to the post you left a comment on so that student gets a pingback or trackback.
Original image: ‘Family Computer‘
by: Alex Watson
Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License