Blog Challenge
Well it’s 31+ days into a 31 day challenge – by Darren Rowse. [We started on day 19 and now its over and just beginning] A challenge that hasn’t been written for a class of 8 and 9 year old students but we just want to see what we can get out of it … and how we can ’simply’ share it with others!
BTW (By The Way)
We Won!
Sue Waters announced our good fortune The Real Winners? – All Of Us
Frances McLean Without Frances there would be no chocolate!
Where to now? Michelle Martin created and is driving an open Ning group
Our notes (to be tidied up and shared) … We decided to …
- start at a new beginning – here is our first ‘Blog Challenge’ post
- make it so others can easily follow if they want and copy what they like
- Pick and Choose – in any order we want to develop our blog – we vote a lot.
- Remind each other that ‘Less is More’
- Not forget that there is chocolate involved
- Make individual posts for each challenge day/tip – then edit and add comments
*** we decided this was too complicated so the challenges can be seen here (filtered) but we did copy and paste them in a sub page – and left ‘Day 10 …’ plus ‘Many, many, many extra tips’ to continue our journey later - Use three categories – Blog Challenge, and also learning, miniLegends
- create this page to help ‘Tell Our Story’
Changing the Look of our blog
- looked at different themes – in Presentation. We like ‘Newsportal’ a lot because of the three columns and you can customise it – except for the header. We want to keep our meerkats … our symbol of an online caring community.
- decluttering http://tinyurl.com/2rm3bl
- changed the static ‘welcome’ page to ‘hi!’ – this is less formal and frees up some space at the top of the Regulus theme for new pages eg ‘6 words’ and maybe ‘links’ – this ‘front’ page was originally our about page … we felt there was plenty of info about us in the sidebar and in our blogs.
We’ve changed how we Track who follows us (including statistics)
- 25/08/07 added a clustermap to see where people who visit us are. http://tinyurl.com/2lwfvh
- have activated the Google Analytics plugin and added a Google interactive map
- we’ve added our rss feed to different search engines (see sub page for examples)
We’ve made it easier for people to get in touch and navigate (us and them)
- added a ‘contact us’ plugin. Many thanks to James Farmer (founder of Edublogs) for mentioning us http://tinyurl.com/2trmdp
- created a ’sticky’ post that has many links to help us and visitors navigate within our blog
- we already had a static front page so added some links in that to other parts of our blog that might be missed
- without meaning it, both the last dot points are a bit like a ’sneeze’ page
- created an extra ‘links’ page to add to as we go along but will put some class links in our blogroll and display it in our toolbar
We made sure we kept on sharing our learning journey
- see out ‘posts page’
- we planned how we could make sure that all the minilegends got a turn adding something to the blog. A magnet on the class list shows whose turn it is – they choose anyone they like to blog something to do with our learning … some negotiation with and input from Al … the magnet is moved on to the next person for the next time/day.
[Often recess and lunch are good times for anyone to blog if I'm in the room - Al] - we need to find class blogs of kids our age all over the world. How?
- http://www.google.com.au/blogsearch ?
Spread the word about our blog but more importantly kept and built connections
- commented on other school blogs we’ve connected with before
- read and commented on blogs we’ve never visited before
- created a fun task (6word challenge) and invited others to joi n in
- Al left tweets about our learning on Twitter http://twitter.com/alupton
- search engines could help spread the word eg icerocket
sometimes people might find us accidently
We can also ‘ping’ Technorati which will add any new posts to their database- emailed family and friends to have a look at our learning and comment if they want
- emailed classes we know who haven’t visited before eg Kym’s class in Alice Springs
- look around to see what references to our blog need updating eg http://australianedubloggers.pbwiki.com/FrontPag (we can also look for extra people we can connect with here eg one class has ‘Albert the Blogging Bear’ just like we have ‘Husky the Husky’)
- we need to reply to more of our commenters. There is a ‘notify me’ check box but we don’t know if people have used this so it would be good manners to answer their emails. this will happen more easily when/now the challenge is over and we can relax as we develop our blog further.
I hope we win but I do not want the choclate. And I think we need to try harder to get more on there and there is not much days to do it?
By Phoebe
Hey MiniLegends —
Your blog is looking great! It’s been fun to track you and see what’s up down under. I’m writing from outside of Boston, Massachusetts in the U.S. of A. (But I grew up in Hawaii…so maybe you could add a red dot on the map
I’ve been lagging with the challenge these past few days, but you all inspire me!
Keep it up!
Cammy