2019 Participation Badge for your blog
Download a copy here
More blogging tips here
Film Festivals
7 November
13 November
14 November
Using elements of film to help us write quality comments in response to the Manaiakalani Film Festival movies.
Participating and contributing to annual Film Festivals is a highlight of the year in a number of our clusters. In addition to celebrating together on the day all films are shared on our blogs. Viewing and responding to festival films is another opportunity for our young people to connect with an authentic audience.
Take some time to focus on the elements of a film to emphasise key vocabulary.
Creating Collages with Textured Images
This week's awesome tip comes to us via Uru Mānuka and St Bernadette's School, thanks to Kelsey Morgan.
Grace @ St Bernadette's School has created a collage using images of textures and included Kelsey's helpful instructional slide deck.
Don’t forget to leave Grace a comment!
Lots of opportunities here for Smart Learners to hone their keyboard shortcut skills using Google Draw.
When planning, identify opportunities for learners to create with their chromebooks and to become more confident with the keyboard, touchpad and navigation. This means practising what they are learning, everyday.
Being Cybersmart: Smart Learners - Exploring Tangrams to practise moving, rotating and flipping shapes by Eric Curts.
Options: Take pictures of learners’ artwork and share via a Google Drive folder. Learners reuse original art of peers to create collages.
Being Cybersmart: Smart Media - Through creating, attributing and sharing their own media Smart Learners develop their ability to understand that media is constructed + why it is important to recognise the person who created the media.
Smart Learners critically examine information online
To achieve this learners need to be media literate and develop their ability to analyse, evaluate and respond to various forms of media. This includes understanding what media is, making informed judgements about media and most importantly, creating and sharing their own media.
Share content you and your whānau would be proud of
Engage your audience by posting regularly.
Empower your learners to keep their blog active during the school break whether they have access or not.
Tip: Copy posts from a learners’ blog and schedule on the class blog >>> click for more
Why copy and paste from a Google Doc to Blogger?
Crafting or composing a text in a Google Doc creates a copy for both the learner and teacher.
This copy is a saved record of what has been written and provides access to the Version History in the document.
Viewing history provides valuable information about how the learner has edited their writing and supports reflecting on and editing text.
Scaffolds can be included in a doc for learners as they write e.g. voice typing, writing prompts
Commenting in Docs can also be harnessed for feedback and feedforward to support the learner as they write.
If there are any internet issues when publishing in blogger a copy is saved in Google Drive.
None of the above are available if learners type directly into blogger.
Viewing Student Blog Activity in Hapara Dashboard
We highlighted Monitoring Blog Comments in a previous tip. As admin of your learners’ blogs you should be receiving email notifications when comments are posted on your learners’ blogs. If you are not please make sure you subscribe to blog notifications for all learners’ blogs.
Using Hāpara’s Teacher Dashboard to view learners' blog posts and monitor comments from Blogger enables teachers as blog administrators to access and view all blog posts and comments in one place.
This article from Hāpara includes screenshots and brief explanations of what you are able to view including useful features you can harness to support Cybersmart learning e.g.
Clear Formatting on Blogger
If text in a blog post is running into the sidebar of a published post formatting can be cleared by editing a blog post and clearing blog formatting.
Remove formatting button
Blogger Admin Check
Please check that you are an administrator for all your learners’ blogs. If you cannot access all the blog settings you are only an author. You will need to email your school’s blog administrator and request they update you to administrator
Are you subscribed to comments and posts for your learners’ blogs?
As blog admin you are responsible for moderating comments and spam.
All blogs in Manaiakalani are set to anyone can comment.
As the administrator you are sent an email notification when a learner posts or a comment is left on their blog. The easiest way to monitor interactions on your students’ blogs is through the Teacher Dashboard.
Are you subscribed to comments and posts for your learners’ blogs?
Back
Learners share their Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu Stories
Thank you to teachers Felicia and Manpreet from Edmund Hillary School in Papakura who shared how they are harnessing Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu. Plus feedback from their learners. This slidedeck includes their recommendations and links to their class and learners’ blogs for comments.
Blog comment sentence starters in te reo pakeha and te reo māori
Ngā mihi nui! The team in Otaki have shared these blog comment sentence starters in te reo pakeha and te reo māori. These have been created in Google Draw and can be shared on your class learning site or printed out and laminated. Store them somewhere handy in the classroom for learners to reference when they commenting.
Inserting hyperlinks in a comment can be helpful
Inserting hyperlinks in a comment can be helpful, to share a recommended online resource or example that may be helpful for the blogger. This could also include making a connection by including a link to a post on your blog for the blogger to visit.
Model this with your learners on either a class blog or an individual blog to help them identify when inserting a hyperlink, might be helpful e.g. can I add more information or make a connection by sharing something similar on my blog?
This is a powerful strategy for engaging with your audience and communicating a sense of connection.
Rather than copying and pasting the URL which is not clickable, make text a hyperlink in your comment.
<a href="insert URL here">Insert display text here</a>
Share the html code below on your learning site.
Copy and paste the html code into the comment field and replace the highlighted text.
Copy and paste the URL you want to share and insert the display text
When the comment is published the display text will be a hyperlink
Engaging your learners with blogs and blog comments?
Empower learners to confidently navigate to a range of blogs and identify elements of a blog post on their device.
Creating Quality Comments
Engaging learners with blogs and blog commenting as early as possible will empower them to connect with the purpose of blogging and the elements of a quality blog comment.
We need to learn to recognise the elements of a quality comment if we are to write and respond in kind
Cybersmart: Smart Relationships
Blogging enables our young people to connect with an authentic audience and provides a rich and engaging platform to learn to create a positive digital footprint.
Blog Detectives alerts learners to how much we can discover about an individual when they share online and our impressions of a blogger e.g. what they like, what they are good at, what are their interests?
In this example a Year 8 has reviewed her own blog to connect with the digitial footprint she is creating.
An option for new bloggers is to explore another learner’s blog. Prepare a selection of blogs and provide access on your learning site. Include quality examples of blog profiles that enable your learners to connect with creating a positive digital footprint.
Learners discover how much information they can find out about someone by exploring their blog.
About labels and using them effectively
Labels are useful for both bloggers and their readers as they enable posts to be viewed and searched by label within the blog. When labels are created they appear in the labels gadget in the sidebar of the blog. Click on a label and this creates a unique URL that displays all the blog posts with that label.
We recommend including labels from curriculum learning areas, key competencies, cybersmart, special character labels specific to your school, kura and learners. Labels enable both you and your readers to locate relevant blog posts quickly and share or use them to:
Smart Footprint:Blog Profile
Creating a blog profile is an opportunity for learners to connect with and understand that every time they share online it is contributing to creating their digital footprint. They need to make smart decisions about what personal information they share in their blog profile.
Learners with Blogs
Learners with a new Blog
Screencastify for Chromebooks
If you are new to using Screencastify see the Cybersmart site for setup plus recommendations and support for the following...
Lots of options for learners to record sound and action when creating and sharing Digital Learning Objects + a versatile tool for peer and self reflection.
Empower your chromebookers, to amplify and turbo charge their learning
The Love You Give
This week, 13 May - 17 May, sees a nationwide event that at its heart aims to celebrate who we are and spread aroha, kindness and kaitiakitanga.
Our young people will be seeing and hearing messages in support of these events via the media and online and you also may be considering supporting Pink Shirt Day on Friday 17th in your school.
Please take some time to consider the principles of our Manaiakalani Cybersmart Curriculum when engaging our young people with these themes.
Especially if your learners are creating and sharing content online , in response to next week’s events. Read more here...
Embed Video from Google Drive
For Learners Google Drive is the default to share video.
Video can be embedded in a blog from Google Drive, where learners connect with their audience via blog comments. As administrators of these blogs teachers are able to monitor content and interactions through their email and Hapara Teacher Dashboard.
Upload video file to Google Drive
Paste code into your blog as html
Customise size in html eg:
height="380" width="520"
Paste and Match Style
Smart Footprint
Blogging enables our young people to connect with an authentic audience and provides a rich and engaging platform for our young people to learn to create a positive digital footprint. Making connections and sharing via the class blog, school blogs and blogs across our clusters enables learners to begin engaging with creating a Smart Footprint whether they are blogging individually or currently sharing via their class blog.
These recommendations and resources are intended to support teachers to identify and design cybersmart learning that:
Prior to designing cybersmart learning we recommend reading and connecting with the Smart Footprint Cybersmart Curriculum.
The learning outcomes are the same for all our young people. How you engage your learners with the learning and connect with these outcomes will be in response to the strengths and interests of your learners.
Schedule Blog Posts
The time zone should have been set when the blog was created to GMT+12 (Auckland) when the blog was created.
Tip: Copy a post from a learners’ blog and schedule on the class blog
Tip: Copy a post from a learners’ blog
Use the html in the Blogger post editor to copy and paste posts from your learners’ blogs and schedule them to your publish on your class blog.
Open two tabs in your browser to enable you to quickly navigate between blogs
Include a link to the learner’s blog and label with their first name.
Monitoring Blog Comments
All blogs in Manaiakalani are set to anyone can comment.
As the administrator you are sent an email notification when a learner posts or a comment is left on their blog. The easiest way to monitor interactions on your students’ blogs is through the Teacher Dashboard.
As blog admin you are responsible for moderating comments and spam.
Log into your blogger dashboard and select the blog you want to monitor comments for.
Click comments then delete comments or mark as spam if the comment looks like spam.
This will delete the comment and also, over time, blogger will recognise spam comments and automatically move them to spam.
Create a Collage
Another option for sharing multiple images without having to scroll is to create a collage.
There are lots of online Apps you can use to create a collage however I recommended you start with Google Draw as this is what our students are using on their Chromebooks.
Create a collage, save as an image file and insert into your blog. Some collage creators also include html to embed the collage in your blog post.
If you are using Google Photos, see screencast right, to create a collage in Google Photos
Google Drawing
Insert images, resize and position
Double tap drawing canvas, select background colour
File - Download as a jpg
or
Publish to the web and embed in your blog post.
To publish a file:
Blogger Background
We have a standard blog template which includes a body layout with three columns and specific gadgets to support our cybersmart learning. However one option for personalising your blog is to create your own background with student art - example. Take photos of the art and organise using a Google Drawing. Download a PNG and upload as a background for your blog. See screencast above. Learners use images they have created and upload their background to Google Drive as only teachers can edit backgrounds as administrators. Recommend setting expectations of your learners before they can personalise their blog background e.g. Evidence of Cybersmart Learning and Blogging.
Tuhi Mai Tuhi Atu
Weekly Tips 2019
Each week we will be sharing a new blogging tip here for you. If you or your learners would like to contribute a blogging tip please create and share your tip on your blog, email fiona.grant@manaiakalani.org and I will feature a link to your blog post in this slide deck.
Manaiakalani
Manaiakalani