Al Upton » Blog Challenge http://alupton.edublogs.org 2009 minis will now be at http://minilegends.edublogs.org/ Tue, 20 Jan 2009 07:53:33 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 six words http://alupton.edublogs.org/six-words/ http://alupton.edublogs.org/six-words/#comments Sun, 26 Aug 2007 02:36:15 +0000 Al Upton http://alupton.edublogs.org/six-words/ 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 :D

]]> http://alupton.edublogs.org/six-words/feed/ 35 Our Google Map http://alupton.edublogs.org/our-google-map/ http://alupton.edublogs.org/our-google-map/#comments Sat, 25 Aug 2007 05:56:04 +0000 Al Upton http://alupton.edublogs.org/our-google-map/ 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!

minilegends-room-16-600-x-450.jpg

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.

View Larger Map

]]> http://alupton.edublogs.org/our-google-map/feed/ 0 Voicethread – Choose Your Own Adventure http://alupton.edublogs.org/voicethread-choose-your-own-adventure/ http://alupton.edublogs.org/voicethread-choose-your-own-adventure/#comments Wed, 22 Aug 2007 15:37:37 +0000 Al Upton http://alupton.edublogs.org/voicethread-choose-your-own-adventure/ ANOTHER EXPERIMENT :roll:

Working on the whole class collaboration

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’

Our story hanging up and recording our voicethread

We plan to make voicethreads on

‘Why we love Edublogs’
‘The 31 day Blog Challenge’

]]> http://alupton.edublogs.org/voicethread-choose-your-own-adventure/feed/ 6 Many, Many Extra Tips and Tricks http://alupton.edublogs.org/many-many-extra-tips-and-tricks/ http://alupton.edublogs.org/many-many-extra-tips-and-tricks/#comments Sun, 19 Aug 2007 13:35:32 +0000 Al Upton http://alupton.edublogs.org/many-many-extra-tips-and-tricks/ http://www.problogger.net/31-days-to-building-a-better-blog/

]]> http://alupton.edublogs.org/many-many-extra-tips-and-tricks/feed/ 0 Day 15 – Make Your Most Popular Posts Sticky http://alupton.edublogs.org/day-15-make-your-most-popular-posts-sticky/ http://alupton.edublogs.org/day-15-make-your-most-popular-posts-sticky/#comments Sun, 19 Aug 2007 13:29:21 +0000 Al Upton http://alupton.edublogs.org/day-15-make-your-most-popular-posts-sticky/ http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/08/15/stickify-your-blog/

]]> http://alupton.edublogs.org/day-15-make-your-most-popular-posts-sticky/feed/ 0 Day 10 – Declutter Your Sidebar http://alupton.edublogs.org/day-10-declutter-your-sidebar/ http://alupton.edublogs.org/day-10-declutter-your-sidebar/#comments Sun, 19 Aug 2007 13:21:36 +0000 Al Upton http://alupton.edublogs.org/day-10-declutter-your-sidebar/ 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.

cluttered sidebar

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 :D
  • 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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