Posted by Mrs. Ruffing

This year I am happy to be a volunteer commenter for the challenge. I have 5 students to visit each week and leave a comment on that week’s post. I would like to share the student posts I have visited and encourage others to visit them as well, and check out some of their classmates too.

Challenge Week 1 Students Visited

Arthur from New Zealand – I read all of Arthur’s posts and learned that he loves nature, the beach, and long bike rides. I commented on the unusual and colorful background he has for his blog. His teacher has not yet approved my comment to him.

Tylah from New Zealand – He likes KFC and fish and all sports. I asked if he ever went fishing and ate fish that he caught. KFC seems to be popular in NZ like it is in USA. Here is the KFC menu in New Zealand. Do they have they same menu as in the US?

Molly from New Zealand – She has a great “Where I’m From” entry from February and seems to love drawing and helping her family. She says she lives on a farm filled with tomatoes! I hope she sees my comment soon because her teacher has not approved it yet!

Ella from New Zealand – has a dog and 8 cats! (I told her I was allergic to cats.) She hasn’t seen my comment yet!

Uliti from New Zealand – Uliti says he is from the island of Tonga and from hunting animals in the bush. How interesting it would be to carry on a conversation with him! From Uliti I learned that Malo e lelei means “hello” in Tongan.

Sadly, the country of New Zealand has experienced a terrible tragedy. If only all the people of the world could communicate and learn about each other when they are young and realize that we have the same hopes, dreams, and fears. We hope to communicate further with our fellow bloggers in New Zealand!

 

Challenge Week 2 Students Visited

Miles from USA – Miles made a slide show of his 5 rules for good commenting but I couldn’t actually see it because it may have only been shared with people in his school. I asked if he could change his share settings but so far he hasn’t. He also has some posts on random crafts that he makes so check out his other posts if you can’t see his slide show.

Lucy from USA has a very colorful post on her rules for commenting. She believes that commenting can start a conversation and reminds us to PROOFREAD!

Leon from Taiwan is 9 years old and shared his thoughts on commenting. He thinks commenting is a way to make friends and learn from other people. I agree!

Evanne from Taiwan is opposed to very long comments and also people arguing or saying mean things to each other in comments. She sees a lot of that on social media.

Jerry from Taiwan is 16 and has many comments on his week 2 post. I liked that he talked about comments being a motivation for the blogger.

Our class is excited to be a part of the Student Blogging Challenge. So far they have created an avatar, an About Me page, and written a short intro post to their blogs. Here is our slide show of all our class avatars. Many thanks to Mrs. Vasquez for sharing her template! The students have also put the same information in the About page on their individual blogs. Please check out their individual posts and pages and get to know the awesome fifth graders of Cougarcraft!

Mrs. Morris has posted the first challenge of our Student Blogging Challenge!

What do we need to do this week?

Create an avatar.  Since we are using iPads we will need to find the best way to do this with our iOS devices. Here are some suggestions.

PICKAYOO – This is a free avatar creation app for both male and female simple style avatars. Here is Mrs. Ruffing’s PICKAYOO avatar.

 

 

 

Portrait Shop Cute -free app for both male and female avatars. There is also a Portrait Shop Animal version if you prefer. Here is a male avatar from this app.

 

 

 

Avatar Maker: Selfie – This is a free app for male or female avatars.  There are many variations of this app.

(Who says your avatar needs to look just like you!)

 

 

Finally, if you have access to another device like a laptop or desktop computer, you can use avatarmaker.com  or photos-share.com (these don’t work on iPad) . Websites like  avachara.com  and mybluerobot.com can be used on any device.  Here are examples from these sites.

 

 

2.  A second task of this week’s challenge is to create an About Me page.  A “page” will be accessible on another tab of your blog and it will be static, unlike a post that will gradually move down the page as more posts are added. Look at the top of our class blog page.  Do you see “About Us” at the top? That’s a different location than where your posts are appearing. How to add the About Page? Here is a video that shows the steps for adding a new page in Edublogs.

 

Be sure to review directions in Google Classroom for the shared Google slide project where we will put our “about me” info and avatars together into one slide show. Please write a PRIVATE COMMENT on that assignment if you have any questions and we will help you out. Sounds like a great snow day activity!

Mrs. R.