Blogging features we liked

When we looked around at other people's blogs to get ideas, we needed a way to keep a record of the features we thought looked good and might want to put onto our blog.
We took snapshots of those ideas (Command-Shift-4) and put them onto a Keynote mindmap along with a web address so that we could go back and find the features we liked without too much trouble.
We converted our Keynote slides to jpegs and here is a Quicktime movie of our mindmaps.

Science Fair - Holidays

Over the holidays, you are required to prepare for Science Fair by reading through the instruction booklet and deciding on a topic.

You need to have your topic ready to tell me on the first day of Term 2.

Click the hyperlinks to see the Science Fair instruction booklet and a very comprehensive list of Science Fair ideas. (You need a gmail account to access these Google Docs files).

You are welcome to print out the instruction booklet and list of ideas at home if you wish.

Click these hyperlinks to see the powerpoint of the Science Fair process and the Technology Science Fair process that we looked at in class. (You need a gmail account to access these Google Docs files).

You can also get these files by going to Mr Marsh's LMS page. To access this, sign into Ourspace, then scroll to the bottom of the screen where it says 'Search Courses'. Enter the word 'science' and click 'go'. Then click on the word 'Science' at the top left.

Original topics are best - avoid cliched topics like 'which bread grows the most mould?', 'which bubble gum grows the biggest bubbles?', 'which baked beans produce the most gas?'.  Remember experiments which involve moulds or bacteria or those which would hurt animals or people in any way are not allowed.

Also, the Regional Science Fair has awards and $$$ prizes associated with; engineering, conservation (a number), things Maori, radio, mineral/mining, statistics, flour/baking industry, forestry, horticulture, agriculture, sports, and technology science investigations so you may want to follow one of these lines.

Finally, you will need to buy a 1B5 exercise book which will be your log book for Science Fair. 

River can do blog

Feed the fish widget

We looked around today for ideas for our class blog on other blogs.

By far the most popular feature we liked was the swimming fish widget!

So, check out the new room 4 fish tank...

Ideas for our class blog

The purpose of our blog is to be a cool tool that we can all use to share our class news. 


A great way to build an awesome blog is to go and look at other people's blogs and borrow their ideas. 
So, it's time for us to look around to get some ideas of what would make a great class blog.


Here are some blog weblinks to start off looking at...


Classroom blogs
http://super7scoopers.edublogs.org/
http://openthedoortob4.blogspot.com/
http://yollisclassblog.blogspot.com/
http://yollis365project.blogspot.com/
A class blog run by the students
A NZ Year 4 class blog 


And of course you can check out any of the TIS class blogs on ourspace.


Personal blogs
A kids art skills blog
A 17 year old girl's personal blog about baking
A children's book reviewer blog
Miss C's friend's blog


Also, Google has a special search tool to only search for blogs which is handy if you wish to go looking http://blogsearch.google.com/

You are looking for features you like and think would work on our class blog.
It might be a particular widget or gadget, a layout you like, a heading, a font, an idea for a great blog post, a link, a web 2.0 software tool.


Collect your ideas up as a mind-map on 1 Keynote slide. You should have a screenshot and brief text to explain what it is you like about the feature you have found. Please include a web address. For example:

Success Criteria:
- name on your keynote page
- screenshot of each feature you are including
- introduce us to at least 3 features you'd like to see on our class blog
- your spelling, punctuation and grammar are accurate in your keynote
- exported to the Room 4 server

Blogging

Mrs Mills came into our room and taught us about Blogging.  We learnt what blogging was about and we learnt some blogging features.