These are your tasks for week 1:

1. Make sure you can log into your blog successfully and access your dashboard.
2. Make and upload an avatar for your blog.
3. Write your ‘About Me’ page.

Activity 1: Create an avatar to use on your blog.  There are many different avatar creation sites on the web. I have been to many of them and created lots of different avatars. Some you just save and download to your computer to then upload into your blog. Others you need to use the snipping tool to save a square image of your avatar. It is always best to save as a jpg format.

Symbaloo

To add your avatar to your blog, if using Edublogs, check here.

Some examples of avatars made by other students:

• Like Lego figures – click here and here is a post from Brianna about her avatar
• Like comics – bitstrip avatars from Birney Bulldogs
• Will used toondoo to create a family avatar
• Mrs Vazquez’s class used google slides to show off their avatars

Activity 2: Write or update your About Me page.

Whenever I visit a blog for the first time, I always check to see who the person is that is writing the blog posts. Do they have similar interests to me?

If you already have an About Me page, you might want to create an About Bedfordshire page as well. Be creative:

• Write a poem
• Write an A-Z paragraph eg I am an athletic, yet brainy child who decided that saving the environment is one of my future goals. Check out how one of the mentors created her about me page especially for the student blogging challenge
• Create a tellegami like our mentor Dinah has done
• Create a list of things people might not know about you like Ms Herring has done
• Write a Who am I like Mrs Keane or Mrs Lyttle
• Students in Ireland paired up to create their about us page, Ms Seitz’ class did the same, Mrs Moore’s class are new bloggers
• Penelope, Warrior Kat, Harry, Daniela, Mikaila,
• Brianna (a student mentor) has a great favourites about me page, as well as an A-Z post
• Anna, a new student mentor this year, has a continually updated About Me page

Instructions for creating your page:

1. Login to your blog, go to Settings> Discussion and make sure the default setting is ticked for allow people to leave comments> save the changes at the bottom
2. Now go to the dashboard>pages>add new
3. Change the title to About Me or something similar.
4. If you only have one row of icons above the box, click on the last icon called the kitchen sink or toggle. This opens a second row which allows you to change font colours.
5. In the box, write a bit about yourself remembering to be internet safe. Make sure you have checked out the pages from other students mentioned – many of them have been blogging for a while.
6. In the area under the page writing box, you should see a Discussion box – open this and make sure you have ticked Allow comments.
7. When you have finished click the big  button on the right side of your screen – probably says update or send for review.
8. Once you have saved your about me page, go back and delete the sample page.
9. If your theme doesn’t show pages in the header area, then you will need to go to dashboard> appearance> widgets and drag across the Pages one to your sidebar.

Finished the work for week 1?

Then head off to the class blog list and start visiting other blogs. You might not want to comment this week but maybe check them out. Are there any students with interests the same as you?