This year, my colleague Athena Manjarrez and I are collaborating to have our students participate in the 2015 Student Blogging Challenge. This entails completing different tasks each week, and reaching out to other blogging classes around the world. I’m REALLY excited to see how everyone’s posts and blogs turn out!
This is the exemplar that I originally posted on our class blog for the first challenge.
Activity #1: Are you a different person online than you are in real life?
Honestly I am very similar online and offline. I’m a mix of silly and educational, but I don’t plan on catching me being too serious! When I have to, I can sound “academic” and “smart,” but for the most part, you’ll find that I’m more conversational online, much like I am in person.
Why? Because this is my real, authentic self. I suppose I could pretend to be someone like a professor and scholarly person, however that’s exhausting and not worth the effort. I recall going through some of my old blog posts many years ago, and I sound SO STUFFY and verbose.
Activity #2: Myself as avatars
Avatars are supposed to represent the real me, so I decided to play with different avatar makers.
I made this one at www.moeruavatar.com:
A similar one from www.abi-station.com:
Another good one for the iPad is http://doppelme.com:
This was a fun one from www.reasonablyclever.com (however this doesn’t work on the iPad, only on a computer):
Finally, I made this one at www.manga.com (again, this doesn’t work on the iPad, only on a computer):
I’m sure there are many more avatar sites, however I found it difficult to use many of them on the iPad. I have to take this into consideration since the majority of my students will complete this challenge on their iPad. That being said, I’ve seen many of my students create amazing avatars, and it’s amazing how innovative they are and their ability to troubleshoot!
As you can see, there’s a common theme with all of my avatars: short hair, glasses, and female. This doesn’t necessarily represent everything about me, however I personally like my avatar to actually look like me rather than an animal or other object. I guess I’m just simple that way!
Activity #3: About Me
I entertained many options for doing this last part, particularly since it needs to be more than just a paragraph about myself. So here are some ideas:
– Create a Thinglink
I made this one for a different blog post. It’s not about me as much as it’s about the essentials that I need to teach.
– Create an iMovie
Remember this one for Open House? This explains what’s going on in my class.
– Create a Tellagami
This was fun to make, I don’t know why I don’t do this more often!
There are a lot of iPad apps that you can use for this part, but the important consideration is that this last section includes an element that is either multimedia (iMovie and Tellagami) or interactive (Thinglink).
Here’s also another example of this post that Mrs. Manjarrez made:
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I also gave students a set of instructions and a rubric so that they’ll know how they’re being evaluated.
If you’re also participating in the challenge, I look forward to reading your posts! Let me know in the comments below and I’ll send my students your way. Once my students have completed this first post, their next assignment will be to comment on other students’ posts, both within our class and around the world!
