Better Blogging Battle

Spring into Reading is upon us at CDNIS and “we’ve gotta keep reading… ’cause this books gonna be a good book!”

This week’s challenge involves getting your audience involved in your reading. Do you know of any widgets or apps that allow you to share your reading lists with other bloggers? Want to know what other people are reading and enjoying? Ever need a good book recommendation? Well here’s your chance to share your favorite books and help us all Spring into Reading.

Challenge # 3: Install a Shelfari Widget

3. Activate a Shelfari widget on your blog to showcase what you are reading

Have fun becoming better bloggers!

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Are you getting noticed yet?

This week’s challenge is about getting noticed and attracting more readers from around the globe. I’ve noticed that a lot of us need to broaden our audience and get some new readers interested in our blogs!

Ever feel like the only person who reads your blog is your teacher? Or better yet, your parents? Or grand-parents? Do you want to have friends and pen-pals from classrooms all over the world? You could read their blogs and they could read yours!

I happen to have the perfect solution to finding kids just like you!

There is an international Student Blogging Competition which starts every year in September and March. It is hosted by a teacher, the amazing Ms. Wyatt from Australia, who organizes thousands of student blogs and classroom blogs. Last year, some of the CDNIS Gr.5 classes took part in the September Challenge.

So this week, you’re going to use The Blogging Challenge’s incredibly long list of Global Student Bloggers from the September 2011 Challenge to find kids just like you! Simply check out the loooooooooong list of blog participants from all over the world. This chart tells you the name and age of the blogger as well as their home country and their current interests. Awesome!

Your task:

1. Figure out how to add new links to your blog – see the left-side menu in your dashboard.

2. Add at least 10 student blogs from anywhere around the world. To add a blog link you must give them a name and then copy/paste their URL into the link form.

3. Organize your links by giving them categories (for your new friends think about something like My Global Friends or My Global Community)

4. You will need to make a comment on these student blogs to say hello, introduce yourself and let them know that you are putting a link to them on your blog because you like their blog and/or you have common interests. I bet that they will also want to put a link to your blog and then even their friends will check out your blog. If you make 10 new friends and they have 10 friends each who check out your blog – that’s 100 NEW visitors right there!

5. Go into your widgets and place a “links” widget in your side bar – select which categories you want to show up

6. You’re done Now, check out other BBB participants and see who they choose for their links!

Great Work Better Blogging Battlers!

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It’s time to meet your teacher advisors. These mentors are helpful and knowledgeable people who are interested in learning about blogging through your work as well as eager to help you succeed and become a better blogger. Your teacher advisor is going to visit your blog regularly to see your challenges, give you feedback through comments and keep track of how your blogging battle skills are improving. To make things easier for them, this week’s challenge involves making a category for all your BBB or BBB-related posts.

Categories help us stay organized and find things when we need find them in a hurry. It’s annoying to scroll through your entire blog to find something that you wrote about 3 months ago. Categories help us keep things neat, tidy and easy to find.

This category you will create for this challenge will appear in your menu and all posts that are marked with the category will be recorded there. We will call this new category “BBB“.

Here are the steps for making a new category.

If you’re having trouble with this – then that’s good! It’s called a challenge, remember? If this is too easy for you, then just wait – the challenges will get harder in the new year 

Please take a look at this Google Doc to see who your assigned teacher advisor is going to be. You will hear from them in after the Winter Break.

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Wordle is a cool tool to make tags. As in the picture below, is my Wordle tag. You can’t really click on it so it’s a bit weird. Tagxedo also works to make tags. Challenge 3 for The Better Blogging Battle is to make a tag and this is mine. I might make a Tagxedo tag in the future.

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What is a Word Cloud? Well, Wikipedia says,

“A tag cloud (or word cloud) is a visual representation for text data, typically used to depict keyword metadata (tags) on websites, or to visualize free form text. ‘Tags’ are usually single words, and the importance of each tag is shown with font size or color. This format is useful for quickly perceiving the most prominent terms and for locating a term alphabetically to determine its relative prominence. When used as website navigation aids, the terms are hyperlinked to items associated with the tag.”

In other words, a tag cloud or word cloud is a picture that shows words of different sizes, layouts, fonts and colours to see which words are the most significant within a body of text (i.e key words). You can do this with an essay or a website or a school assignment or even a blog!

Take some time to look back on the posts you have made this year. What are they mostly about? Has your writing changed over time? Do you see improvements and differences as you progressed over the year? For this week’s challenge, you need to create a word/tag cloud of your blog, showing the key words and common topics of your blog. You can use Wordle if you’d like, but you can also find out about some other word cloud creators, such asTagCrowd or Tagxedo. Play around a little bit with more than one get a final image that you really like. Post your new word/tag cloud to your own blog and write a short post explaining why you’ve created this. You should state which online tool you used to create your image.  You can also tell you readers if you feel that the image describes your blog accurately. Why or why not? Were you surprised with the words most represented in the cloud?

Here is a word cloud that I made by inserting the BBB Blog as the URL using the tool Tagxedo. I really think this is the tool that allows you to be the most creative, but you’ll need to play around for a looooong time 

Good Luck!

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It’s always nice to know when a new challenge comes out (every second Monday) and there’s a cool way to get an email notification telling you about the newest challenge. We’re going to use a very sophisticated RSS feed called Feed Burner. This tool will send you an email every time the BBB site is updated. Cool!

Part A: Sign up for BBB notifications via email.

By signing up for the email notification, you will be listed on Ms. Cahusac’s FeedBurner. As the owner of the BBB, Ms. Cahusac will be able to see who has and who has not successfully signed up for the news feed using FeedBurner. Therefore I will know exactly who has done this second challenge. Make sure you follow all the steps carefully! Begin by putting your email in the space provided by FeedBurner box on the right –> just under the revolver map. Next you will get an email and you must click on the link to ‘activate’ your subscription. That’s it!

Part B: Optional and only for High-Flyers – Create your own FeedBurner for your own blog!

For this step you will need to create a FeedBurner account. For this, you will need a google account. There are a lot of steps! Can you figure it all out? Try your very best and come to see Ms. Cahusac if you get really stuck.

A special note about the BBB - Not everyone has successfully completed Challenge # 1. If you are registered and you believe that you are participating in this competition, you better make sure you are signed up properly and that you’re doing the challenges properly. Otherwise you will not be considered for the final prize packages. It’s not too late to sign up for the BBB and you can catch up by doing the challenges whenever you can. Registration will remain open until Winter Break. So if you’re still just thinking about doing the BBB, you can start whenever you’re ready!

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The BBB is a great activity because you can learn how to be better bloggers. If you become one of the best bloggers by the end of the year, you will get a whole bunch of computer things as prizes. I joined the BBB because I want to improve my blogging skills. Click here to visit their blog.

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