six words August 26, 2007
Posted by Al Upton in 6 words, Blog Challenge, Edublogs, connect, fun, learning, miniLegends.35 comments
Ernest Hemingway was a very famous author.
He was encouraged to write a story in just six words.
Here is one that he really liked and thought was one of his best works … so the story goes.
‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ [This started a brilliant class discussion]
Please add your own 6 word stories in the comments.
Please let other people know so they can visit us and join in the fun.
We will collect them and present them for everyone to share.
Our negotiated task
- Write a ’story’ using 6 words.
- our 1st one – by Kyle “We have lots of fun here”
- It can be any 6 words but sentences are good too
- no swear words, it must be appropriate for our age (8 and 9 year olds)
- remember ! “…” , ? capitals . ‘
- it must be a story, give the sense, idea or part of a story … people can read into it what they want
- twists (unexpected endings) are fun
minLegends - write as many as you like for a post in your own blogs but please add a comment here with your best one.
Click here to read some examples – opens ‘6 words’ page above in a new window
— feel free to leave comments there as well 
Our Google Map August 25, 2007
Posted by Al Upton in Blog Challenge, connect, learning, miniLegends.add a comment
This is a map of our school and a couple of other things. The marker points to our door – we have the classroom looking over the oval. We plan to add more to the map like pictures, text, sound (if we can) and video!
We decided that too many videos and interactive sites embedded in the blog can slow things down at school and make people not want to visit so we are putting in more links.
This screenshot is our first attempt that didn’t save for some reason 
We have/will also put a link to our school/classroom location in a textbox widgit in the sidebar.
Here is a link to our archives (older posts) when we looked at maps and navigation
http://alupton.edublogs.org/maps-latitude-and-longitude/
This link to other sites -
last year’s miniLegends blog (thinking about how we might blog this year)
http://alupton.wordpress.com/2006/12/11/writer-for-the-kids-2007/ includes maps.
Voicethread – Choose Your Own Adventure August 23, 2007
Posted by Al Upton in Blog Challenge, Edublogs, learning, miniLegends, voicethread.6 comments
ANOTHER EXPERIMENT 
We are making a voicethread of the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ story we made for book week and put up outside our room.
http://tinyurl.com/yuod37
Here is a picture of the story all hanging up -
Choose Your Own Adventure (with Husky)
‘One Busy Day’
We plan to make voicethreads on
‘Why we love Edublogs’
‘The 31 day Blog Challenge’
Many, Many Extra Tips and Tricks August 20, 2007
Posted by Al Upton in Blog Challenge, learning, miniLegends.add a comment
http://www.problogger.net/31-days-to-building-a-better-blog/
Day 15 – Make Your Most Popular Posts Sticky August 20, 2007
Posted by Al Upton in Blog Challenge, learning, miniLegends.add a comment
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/08/15/stickify-your-blog/
Day 10 – Declutter Your Sidebar August 19, 2007
Posted by Al Upton in Blog Challenge, learning, miniLegends.add a comment
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/08/10/declutter-your-sidebar/
Please check our Blog Challenge page to see notes of our journey.
We came into the challenge on Day 19 so this is where we started.
Today we went through the first 19 tips and decided to start on a couple of them.
There are some things we don’t need in the sidebar.
- we got rid of the about page but because we hace a static welcome
page we can still make the ‘about’ text in the sidebar shorter – people
haven’t got time for a lot of words and some links are on the ‘Home’
page – LESS is MORE - the box.com storage site widget is filtered in SA. It was an experiment but needs to be removed
- ‘Meta’ needs to stay there so we can easily login
- There are too many ‘Categories’ and we can link to these in other
posts especially if we can make one post stick to the top of all the
others - To help visitors (and us) navigate we could add ‘Recent Comments’
- One idea is to (later on) cut and paste all the comments on the ‘Welcome’ page in a subpage – we haven’t decided on this yet
- we can add more colour and useful headings – we might decide to do this on our ‘Blog Challenge’ page
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