The website explains the purpose of Blog Action Day:
Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion
This global event first took place in 2007, when bloggers from all over the world were asked to unite on the topic of ‘The Environment’. The global groundswell of ideas and imagination got the attention of the United Nations Environmental Programme, the European Union Commissioner for the Environment Stavros Dimas, and received international press coverage.
Take your time to explore the website in full.
Download a banner for your blog. You just need to copy the embed code, click to the html tab and paste the code in. Sue Waters explains the technical side of things on her blog.
Read the post ideas if you’re looking for inspiration.
In opening this task up to you, my students, I wanted to ensure that I supplied some empowering resources to generate your thoughts. It can be very easy to get down in the dumps about poverty, to think to yourself ‘but I’m one person, what can I do?’ Don’t let the issue get you down – do something instead!
Here are some examples of inspiring ways of approaching this issue and posting your ideas:
Find out exactly how Free Rice works: site sponsors donate money to the UN World Food program every time you get a question right.
Read about the 11 and 12 year old students in New Zealand raising money for the Kiwis for Kenya movement. These are schoolkids just like you!
Read the inspirational story of 11 year old Laura Stockman, and the projects her ideas have generated on the Working Together to Make a Difference social network of educators
Join the Oxfam In My Name movement to work towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals
Get involved in the massively multiplayer online game Superstruct and devise ideas to address future problems.
Watch The Girl Effect. I have embedded the video below. If that doesn’t work at school, follow the link to the main site.
Why is this issue important? Because if we don’t address poverty, life will remain essentially unfair for so many people on our planet. Read about the teacher at a school in Nepal that Anne Mirtschin, a Victorian teacher, connected with.
Last week’s awards were made for to blog posts, rather than a blog post and comment as usual. We still need to get the hang of commenting and will be talking about this is class. But without further ado, the two blog post awards (which were for the final week of term 3 and the holiday period went to:
xX.Batman.Xx for her post from Cradle Mountain in Tasmania. Not only did she post to her blog unprompted, but she trundled through adversity in order to find an internet connection just to do so.
Secondly, an award to Tigstar, who participates with such enthusiasm in our classroom blogging. Her post was a reflection on holidays, and nicely complimented our writing task for the first week back.
Well done to both award winners
Do you like the image above? It’s a collection of images of Cradle Mountain in Tasmania. It was generated using a website called ‘Tag Galaxy‘ which searches the ‘tags’ or titles applied to photos and produces a graphic of them. You can access it from home if you have an internet connection.
Remember footy trading cards? The Character Trading Cards interactive tool allows you to create a character profile that not only looks good, but allows you to gain real insight into a character.
Have a go at creating a character profile of one of the main characters in Falling from Grace. Kip and Annie are the characters we know most about, but you might like to challenge yourself by profiling one of the more obscure characters.
Just be careful, because this site is Flash-based, you can’t save changes as you go, you can only print the final product, so make sure you don’t accidentally exit and lose your work!
Falling from Grace is set during the school holidays, a time of fish and chips, sandy feet, swatting flies and sticky icy-poles.
This writing task involves you focusing and reflecting upon a holiday memory. It may be recent or it may be from when you were a young child.
The form of writing for this task will be imaginative, descriptive or personal writing. You may embellish factual information with imagination (ie. It doesn’t have to be true).
The language you use should evoke a memory and describe the scene. Your purpose is to describe and reflect on an experience. The intended audience is people your own age to adult.
This task will be completed mostly in class, and will be handed in as well as published on your blog on Monday, 13th October, 2008. The length of the piece should be at least 300-400 words.
Some great ideas generated during our brainstorming session in class include:
Playing with plot: in a personal reflective piece you don’t need to stick to Introduction, Complication, Resolution, you can vary it.
An instructional piece: What I learnt from this experience.
Holiday hyperbole: extend it to the ridiculous.
Playing with seasons: not the usual summer holidays; 4-seasons in one day; plans gone wrong.
Inserting strange characters or events.
Photo attribution: Image: ‘IMG_0290-e‘
www.flickr.com/photos/95218719@N00/1277991589 under Creative Commons license.
In case you didn’t know, today, September 19th, 2008, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So avast, me hearties, ye need to talk like ye are pirates!
Common Pirate translations:
Ahoy = Hello
Avast = Take notice, attention
Davy Jones’ Locker = the bottom of the ocean
Fair winds = goodbye and good luck
Me hearties = crew
Arrrr = Grrrr!
There are lots of links for International Talk Like a Pirate Day here, and you can contribute to the Voicethread here. You may need to use these links form home though.
The award for Blog Post of the Week this week went to the prolific GreenGirl. Check out her latest post with 7 tips in 7 days for green living.
The award for Blog Comment of the Week went to EnglishGirl, who was thoughtful, insightful and helpful in the comments that she left on others’ blogs last week.
The next awards for BP and BCOTW will be awarded on the first Monday back, so you have the entire holidays to work away on your blogs. Little Pink Eraser is an early contender as she has been blogging about her family holiday to the Simpson Desert.
6 word stories are all about brevity: can you distill an essential idea, message or concept into just 6 words? The genre is said to have originated with Ernest Hemingway, who when asked to write a story in just 6 words wrote:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn
Possibilities abound from these brief words.
Can you capture the power of a full narrative in just 6 words? Try this as a blog post, coupling your 6 word story with an image that corresponds, as above.
Remember to attribute the source of your photographs as I have done at the end of this post, and to use images available under Creative Commons (not copyrighted)
FlickrCC is the best search engine for Creative Commons images, but you’ll have to access this one from home.
Many of us already know and love the Free Rice website, which challenges users to extend their vocabulary while helping alleviate poverty and hunger. You can find out exactly how the site works here, basically, every time you get a question right, Free Rice sponsors donate to the UN World Food Program.
Free Rice just got teeth, as they have added a range of subject disciplines, so now not only can you improve your vocabulary, but also your grammar. If English ain’t your thing, try the challenges to improve your recall of chemical symbols, capital cities, times tables, or even the artists of famous paintings. Even the multilingual among us are catered for!
Give it a try, maybe you can post your top scores in a blog post?
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