Miss T's Classroom.

photo © 2009 Jeff Golden | more info (via: Wylio)
 

Teegan has completed an excellent post on how to comment on an Edublogs blog.  Breellen also has one that is well explained.  An excellent post for students or parents who are wanting to know what to do. Joseph has some very good pointers for writing comments and Emma has some good tips as well.

Simone has some excellent tips for writing posts.  Indeed they are excellent tips for writing.

Daniel M has written a short post telling us about what school is like in Tonga for him. Check it out.  Leave him a comment.

Our class has been visiting blogs together and leaving comments. We tried to make comments that might keep the conversation going.  We went to Bright Spots, they had been decorating these fabulous pumpkins for Halloween.  We left this comment.

Our whole class watched your pumpkin making together using the digital projector.  We thought all your pumpkins were really creative, really cool.  Not many people celebrate Halloween here in New Zealand. But some people do and they have fun trick or treating.  Only two from our class did that. 5 of us went to a Halloween party.  It’s not really part of our traditions, its more of an American tradition that some people have followed here.  How long did it take to make the pumpkin creatures?  What did you do with them when finished?  How did the people in your class celebrate Halloween? This week we got together and as a class wrote some comments to other blogs. We tried to write comments that would keep the discussion going.

From there we went to Joe’s blog and read about a playstation game he was reviewing.  We replied

A few of the people in our class have played this game but nobody actually owns it.  A few of us have clocked. We just had to explain that word to our teacher. She didn’t know what it meant!!  Are there any cheat codes?  Do you ever use them? Was the last level hard for you? Do you own the game or do you play it somewhere else?  Come and visit our student blogs. 

Lastly we visited a Grade 2 blog and found they were learning about fairy tales, we left them the following comment.

Last term we did a lot of fairy tale work with Mrs Ellis our other teacher.  We did dioramas of fairy tales.  We also had to rewrite a chosen fairy tale.  This week sounds very busy for you. We would like to know how you got on with your quill writing. And what kind of feather did you use for it? Or is the quill something else?  Does it drip very much when you use it?  They used quills in Harry Potter!

If you are in to play station games you might like to visit Joe’s blog, again from the Bright Spots blog. Maybe there is nobody in our class that likes playstation. I don’t think I would! However if you do like such games, drop in on him, read his posts and leave him a comment.

“To get you visiting other blogs, do the following activity – Count out three. On the September participants page, click on the blog of either a student or a class. This is count out one. Now go to the blogroll of that student or class and click on a link to another person. This is count out two. Finally when on that blog, click on the link of someone in that blogroll. This is count out three. Now leave a comment on that person’s blog. Hopefully this is not a blogger you have already commented on. Try this activity at least three times.” Ms Wyatt.

My comment on this to students in the classroom is, try the count out, if you find you can only do a two count out thats okay. The main point is to make comments on blogs you haven’t been to yet, and also to keep up the standard of commenting. Remember our comment pointers, see can you keep the conversation going.  Don’t forget to check when people leave you a comment and reply to them if it is needed.

As a class we have decided that the secret to this is:

*read the post carefully and think.

*Try to write something that will get a conversation going.

*ask an open, interesting question…or…

*give your feelings or state your opinion about the post.

*say what you like or dislike in the post.

*give ideas for improvement that are positive and only if really needed.

*check the sense, spelling and punctuation before submitting the comment.

*keep the size of the comment middle sized. Not too long. Not too short.

*leave your url

*be respectful and tell the truth ( don’t say it’s a great blog when you haven’t really looked at the blog!)

*check back in day or two to see if person who wrote the post or others have replied to your comment.

We will use this to check our commenting and to see what we have succeeded in doing.

MB4 we are a week behind in the blogging challenge, run by Ms Wyatt.  This time we focus on our commenting.  Tomorrow, Tuesday we will be looking at commenting, what makes a good comment and then working in teams we will leave some comments.  We will also together draft a page for our class blog on how we want comments to operate on our blog.  So what makes a good comment? Is coooool a comment that is worth having? What kind of comments do you like on the posts you write?

This week’s challenges from Ms Wyatt’s challenge.

1.  Write a post or even a page about commenting on your blog. What sort of comments will you accept? Do you have to leave a name with a URL?  Are your comments moderated? Explain what this means. Will you accept critical comments about your spelling and grammar etc? 

2.  Visit at least 5 blogs from the participant list and leave appropriate comments.  Keep a record of what you said in a word document or discuss the comments you left  in a post.  Think about what you would like as comments on your blog before you write these. We will be looking at these again at the end of the challenge to see how you have improved with your commenting.

So Tuesday we will cover No 1.  Then for the rest of the week we will work on the commenting. I will show you how to keep a record in a word document, which you will do in some teams that I will organise.