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Spam commenters driving you currently crazy?

You’re not alone — and lots of people have been asking me for advice lately.

So let’s first talk a little on the WHAT and then on ‘the how to deal with them’.

What Are Spam Commenters?

The main reason why people write spam comments is to provide links to promote their web site(s).

Common spamming techniques include:

1.  Creating pingbacks to blog post

2.  Adding links to their web site in the comment and/or the URL

Easiest option is to use Comment Blacklist or Comment Moderation

It’s as simple as:

1.  Go to Settings > Discussion

2.  Add the spammer’s URL, email address, IP address or word(s) commonly used to the Comment Blacklist field or Comment Moderation field

• If you are concerned genuine comments might be blocked you use the Comment Moderation Field

For example, IP address 69.174.246.208, their website and/or car details such as Acura or radiator would work for this comment spam

And it might look like this:

3.  Click Save Changes at bottom of page

Now any pingback that contain any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP is automatically:

1. Held in your moderation queue (if you used comment moderation) – where you can decide if to approve or delete them.
2. Marked as spam and you won’t receive an email notification (if you used comment blacklist)

Alternatively you could also use Akismet – here’s instructions for setting up and configuring Akismet!

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Meet Tammy – a high school science teacher with an outstanding class blog which you can visit here.

Tammy serves as an inspiration to all of us that are interested in creating an online environment that is a natural extension of our classrooms.

She is amazing when it comes to recording her daily classroom notes and embedding them in her class blog as a video.

We thought that you might like to get to know her a bit better and how she does what she does, so we asked her a few questions and she was kind enough to reply.

What were the main reason(s) why you started recording videos for your students?

For years I taught my chemistry and physics students by using dry erase markers on an overhead projector.

When interactive boards came along, I was excited, but I needed to be able to see my students while they worked with me.  When I went behind my demonstration station to work problems on the board, it was like my students thought I’d left the building!

Another challenge was the missing student – students gone on mission trips, students out with the flu, students in tournaments, or students who missed the concepts in class that day and just needed to hear the lesson again.

Everything came together when, from all different directions and just about all at one time, I discovered Edublogs, eBeam Interact (an interactive projection device and software), and the Wacom Cintique Tablet.

How do you create your videos?

I’m able to write on the tablet while facing my students and record both my voice and pen strokes with eBeam and a cordless mic.

At the end of the day, I upload the videos to blip.tv, and then embed them on our class blog.  In addition to blip.tv, other online resources that have been really helpful for me as I post the lessons to the website are compfight.com and Flickr.com

How are you using your class blog?

I use our class blog for posting videos of daily lectures, reviews, and help sessions, but also as an online filing cabinet of sorts for just tons of resources for my students – the weekly syllabus, project information, assignments, interactive websites, tutorials, etc.

So many wonderful teachers and organizations have put such incredible resources for learning chemistry and physics online,  and now my students can access them though our blog.

Another very important way I use our class blog is to keep in touch with my students, and for them to keep in touch with each other, outside of class.

I’m working on helping them learn how scientists across the world communicate by having them share lab results, collaborate on projects, etc., through comments.

They also use the comments to ask me (or their classmates) questions they forgot or might have been hesitant to ask in class.

My chemistry students recently finished the huge end of the year research project, and, oh, my word, I thought someone from Edublogs was going to call and tell us we were overloading the system.

What has been the benefits of your class blog to your students?

Our class blog has proven to be a tremendous resource for my students who for one reason or another have to be absent from class.

From their homes or hotel room, while waiting between races on their lap top, or on iTunes, my students can watch the day’s lecture, watch videos that I might have shown in class through the VodPod, get copies of assignments, learn about upcoming projects, and then ask me or their classmates questions by posting comments.

My students love to see themselves in action, but I could never seem to keep up with getting all the pictures I took printed for everyone to see.  With our class blog, I’m able to use Flickr and post picture and videos on our blog so the students can see all of them, any time, and not just the ones I can afford to print. I also send pics and video to Facebook and Twitter, and I’ve had former students comment on, “I remember when… .”

My kids would never have this kind of interaction with me, with each other, and even with the world without our class blog.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Thank you, Tammy, for all of your kind and informational words!

We would love to hear from others of you out there that are using your blogs in exciting ways to improve the learning experience of students.

Feel free to leave a comment if you would like to share and possibly be part of a future post such as this one!

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Nathan Toft’s response “this must be one of the top ten things to figure out about blogging” to my How To NOT Have Problems Uploading Photos And Using Up Storage Space post has me thinking.

What would my “top ten things to figure out about blogging” list be for new bloggers? And how would my tips compare to others?

Can you help us create a list of “top things to figure out about blogging” for new bloggers?

Please leave a comment to tell us:

1. What are your 3 (or more) most important things a new bloggger needs to know?
2. Alternatively, tell us what you don’t understand or want to know more about in terms of blogging?  So we can help you!

Thanks to Nathan Toft for inspiring this post!

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Many online tools provide embed code that you can use to embed them into other web sites.  The good news is that Edublogs allows you to add almost any embed code into blog posts, pages and text widgets.

This means there are lots of online tools that you can embed to really spice up your posts — providing more variety for your readers and engaging your students!

Let me show you how easy it is to set up a Wallwisher and add it to a blog post.

About Wallwishers

Wallwisher is an online notice board creator.

It’s a really fast and easy way to create engaging activities to use with students.

It’s as simple as:

1. Create your Wallwisher
2. Add some sticky notes
3. Embed into your Blog Post
4. Add more sticky notes

The sticky notes can be as simple as text only OR very creative with images, audio, video, SlideShares, Google Presentations, blog posts (basically almost anything you can link to via their URL)!

And students don’t need to have a Wallwishers account to use it!

Here’s examples how you can use with students:

1. Frieda Foxworth’s Wallwisher’s in the classroom – includes a great ‘How to’ Wallwisher video
2. Ann Leaness’s Wallwisher and Stupeflix in the Classroom - make sure you check out the video at the end to see how she uses a Wallwisher to gather images to create a video with Stupeflix
3. Tom Barrett’s 19 Interesting ways to use Wallwisher in the Classroom
4. The Conch’s online “post-it parking lot” for pop culture points. Students earn extra credit when they make connections to what they are learning in class. Click on each post title to check out their different wallwishers.

Below is a  Wallwisher I’ve created:

I’ve set up this Wallwisher as a sandpit site.

Click on ‘Post a Sticky’ to add your own notes to the wall — why not add your thoughts on how it could be used or share links to your Wallwisher!

How To Create a Wallwisher

1.  Go to Wallwisher and click on ‘Build a wall‘

2.  Select your Wallwisher image, add your title and your subtitle

2. Add your name and email address

3.  Choose your Wall URL, who can view, who can post sticky notes and decide if you want to approve every post before it is added to the wall.

4.  Select your preferred theme and click Done.

5.  Presto!  Your Wallwisher is created and you can now start addding some sticky notes.

Adding and Viewing Sticky Notes on Wallwisher

1.  You just double click any where on the Wallwisher to add a new sticky note

2.  When the sticky note opens up add your text and/or the URL location of any images, audio, video, SlideShares, Google Presentations, blog posts etc you would like to include in your sticky note and then click OK

Tips:

1.  To locate the URL of an image just right click on the image and select:

• ‘Copy Image location’ when using FireFox
• Properties and then copy the Address (URL) when using Internet Explorer

2.  When viewing a sticky note with an image embedded – click on ZOOM if you want to enlarge the image

3.  When you link to the URL location of audio, SlideShares, Google Presentations, blog posts etc it shows that link using a View icon.  Clicking on VIEW opens up the item on your Wallwisher.

Embedding a Wallwisher in a blog post

Edublogs and Edublogs Campus blogs have been customised so that users can embed almost any HTML code into posts and text widgets.

This means most javascript, iframes and object code can be added e.g. videos, google calendars, vokis, Voicethreads, ebooks, widgets

To add any type of object that uses HTML embed code into a post it is as simple as:

1. Grab the HTML embed code
2. Click on the HTML tab
3. Paste the HTML embed code
4. Click Publish

Embedding a Wallwisher is the same as any other embed HTML code:

1.  Completely write your post including adding title, text, images, tags and categories.
2.  Click on Save Draft, previewed your post and make all necessary edits.

3.  On your Wallwisher go to Do More and select Embed.

4.  Copy the embed code

5.  Click on HTML Tab on your blog post.

6.  Paste the embed code for your Wallwisher into your post where you want it to appear then immediately click Publish

• Don’t click back to Visual Tab before hitting Publish as it can break the embed code.
  Immediately close your post once you’ve published.
• Change back to Visual Editing mode when you write your next post by clicking on the Visual tab.

Presto! Your Wallwisher is embedded in your blog post and others can view and/or add to it!

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This post was written by Sue Wyatt for the Student Blogging Challenge.

Well, we are now into Week 4 of the March 2010 Student Blogging Challenge.

Students have been creating their blogs and making it their own by adding widgets and avatars; they have written about their country, state or town and many have visited other class or student blogs.

Many have written about why you should visit their blog and should they use a real photo as opposed to an avatar when they are on the net.

Every time the challenge is on, I try to visit each individual student blog at least 3 times over the period of the challenge.

It’s becoming harder each time we run the Challenge to visit all the student blogs — due to the numbers of students participating!

So I am putting out an URGENT HELP ME PLEASE!

The Problem

We now have about 700 individual student blogs in the following age ranges participating in the challenge:

• Age 8-10: about 60 blogs
• Age 11: about 110 blogs
• Age 12: about 130 blogs
• Age 13: about 110 blogs
• Age 14: about 110 blogs
• Age 15: about 50 blogs
• Age 16: about 50 blogs
• Age 17+: about 70 blogs

And this isn’t counting the 60 class blogs participating!

With more and more students taking part with their own blogs, it’s becoming harder for me to visit each of their blogs as often.

But comments on their blogs, especially from others outside their class, are very important for motivating and providing guidance.

How You Can Help

By the end of mid April, I would like each of these blogs to receive at least one, preferably two, comments from:

1. Teachers, pre-service teachers  or people in the education sector
2. Students who have blogging at least a year and who have participated in at least one student blogging challenge
   

So we are looking for volunteers who are willing to leave least one, preferably two, comments on student blogs such as:

1. A few clues about how to set up their blogs would be great for the newer students who have only had their blogs less than a week or so .
2. Alternatively choose a post they have written or look at their about page to leave a comment for them.

Preferably we would love it if you would write comments where they need to reply to keep the conversation going on their blog.

Here’s example of the types of comments we are looking for:

1. Mrs Yollis’s comment on Abbey’s The Wonderful State of Indiana
2. Great examples of conversation between student and teachers on:
   • Mr Miller’s The Golden State
   • Lojo’s Best Place in the World!!! California
   • Super Scooper’s Our Place in the World

What we would like to do is allocate about 20-30 student blogs to each volunteer.

Benefit of Being a Challenge Helper

This is excellent for teachers and preservice teachers (student teachers) who are:

• Wanting to increase their understanding of how blogs can be used with students.
• Unable to participate with their students in our current Challenge but who want to learn more about the Student Blogging Challenge.

And off course, we appreciate how busy everyone is so we’ve decided to give away twenty free Edublogs Pro 12 month subscriptions (formerly known as Edublogs Supporters) to our twenty best helpers!

You can use these free Edublogs Pro 12 month subscriptions on your own blog or give away to a reader.

To Volunteer As a Challenge Helper

Please leave a comment on this post if you would like to volunteer your services.

Can you please include the following information in your comment:

1. Your name and a bit about your teaching background
2. Your blog URL or website (if you have one)
3. What student age you would like to leave comments for.

Once you have done this we will leave a comment on the post telling you which student on our March 2010 Student Blog list page we would like you to start with and where on the list we would like you to work down to.

Make sure that you tick the notify me of followup comments via email before you submit your comments — so you receive our replies

Please note:

• We recommend that you work directly from March 2010 Student Blog list to visit your student blogs
• Our March 2010 Student Blog list is updated everyday and sorted by age, so new students are added at the end of each age list automatically.
• If you find a link doesn’t go to a blog, could you please copy the line in the student list and email it to Sue Wyatt at tasteach56[at]gmail[dot]com, — so we can fix it
• If you have any questi0ns contact Sue Wyatt by email at tasteach56[at]gmail[dot]com

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We’ve been having  interesting conversations in the comments on Kathleen McGeady’s guest post  Teaching Commenting Skills on ‘is a formal structure or style for writing comments necessary?’

There’s always differing opinions on this type of topic.

So I’d love us to debate it in more detail while expanding the conversation to include blogs posts.

That way we’ll all gain for learning more about why we each take a different approach.

Please leave a comment to share your thoughts on any or all of the following:

1. Should teachers be correcting grammar and spelling in student posts and comments?  If you are correcting, how are you doing this?
2. Is a formal structure or style for writing posts and comments necessary? Refer to Kathleen McGeady’s guest post  Teaching Commenting Skills to see what we mean by formal structure.
   • Is student age an important consideration?
   • And, how do you communicate to your students what is required?
3. How do you balance structure, developing writing skills while empowering student learning and motivating them to want to write?
4. What other advice would you give educators who have just started to blog with their students?

Perhaps you might like to invite your students to share their thoughts?

• Would be interesting to know to what extent they do/don’t want structure?
• How do they feel about their grammar and spelling being corrected in posts and comments?

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It’s my great pleasure to introduce our guest blogger, Kathleen McGeady, who provides important advice on teaching commenting skills (regardless of the age of your students).

About our Guest Blogger

Kathleen McGeady is in the seventh year of her career and in that short time her approach to teaching has changed greatly.

The opportunity to take Teacher Professional Leave in 2008 provided Kathleen with the time to explore the role that ICT and Web2.0 tools can play in the classroom.

Kathleen loves to find new and creative ways to use blogs, the IWB, Web2.0 tools, iPod Touches and global projects and in her classroom to enhance the learning experience of each of her students.

Kathleen is currently teaching Grade Two at Leopold Primary School in Victoria, Australia. She writes about technology integration on her blog and in Education Technology Solutions magazine.

Blogging: Teaching Commenting Skills

This was originally posted on Integrating Technology in the Primary Classroom and has been cross posted with permission from Kathleen McGeady.

I am currently in the process of introducing my Grade Two students to blogging.

Our 2KM class blog is proving to be very popular with students and families.

As I have previously blogged about, I like to follow these steps when introducing blogging to students.

This is my third year of blogging with young students and I am still learning all the time.

In previous years I believe I progressed much too quickly from having students comment on the class blog to writing posts. My students never really learned how to compose a quality comment and I believe I didn’t set my expectations of the students high enough! I was happy for them just to be commenting.

This year I am taking a different approach. Inspired by the amazing commenting skills of Mrs Yollis’ Third Grade students, I am putting a lot of effort into teaching my students how to write quality comments on posts before we move on to writing posts.

By “quality comments” I mean

• writing the comment like a letter (greeting, body, closing, signature)
• using correct spelling, punctuation and spacing,
• reading over the comment and editing before submitting,
• complimenting the writer in a specific way, asking a question, and/or adding new information to the post,
• writing a relevant comment that is related to the post,
• not revealing personal information in your comment.

I really wanted to limit the “I like your blog!!!” or “2KM is cool” type comments and I am finding this explicit teaching of what a quality comment looks like is really working.

I am teaching students commenting skills through

• modelling and composing comments together  on the IWB,
• teaching students about the “letter” format during writing lessons,
• giving examples of a poor/high quality comments and having students vote whether the comment should be accepted or rejected,
• having students read and comment on a post on our blog as part of a literacy rotation on the computer each week.

I collaborated with my teaching partner, Kelly Jordan on this poster “How Can I Write a Great Blog Comment?” to teach students about blogging skills.

We will also send a copy of this poster (as show below) home with each child.

Linda Yollis has written a fantastic article about how to teach commenting skills. It is well worth a read!

I have “borrowed” many ideas from Linda such as recording a screencast video that shows how to leave a comment on the blog. I recorded my screencast through Jing. I also used Linda’s idea of sending an email out to all parents to encourage them to leave comments.

As Linda says, “commenting is what keeps the blog alive” and “teaching and encouraging good commenting skills makes your blog more interesting for everyone.” I agree!

Final Thoughts

Thanks Kathleen for writing this guest post and for all your great work!

Please leave a comment here or on Kathleen’s post if you have any more ideas about teaching commenting skills to students!

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Did I say six weeks?

There’s another couple of tasks that’ll really help you so let’s make that

‘Each week for six eight weeks we’re giving you a new task, with how-to info, to help you with your class blogging’.

This week’s task is to add your student blogs to a folder in Google Reader to make it easier to read their posts.

Why Make it Easier to Read Posts?

It’s important that you and your students are able to quickly read the latest posts from all student blogs because:

1. You need to encourage your students to be reading and learning off each others’ posts (and comments)
2. Learning as part of a community leads to greater knowledge gain and innovation than working independently of each other
3. It makes monitoring what’s written less time consuming and easier

How it’s done

Visiting each individual blog to check for new posts is time consuming.

The better way is to bring the latest posts to you using their RSS feed.

RSS (stands for “Really Simple Syndication) works by retrieving the latest content from blogs and sites you are interested in and bringing them to one location where you can easily read it.

Sites with RSS feeds are normally indicated with the word RSS and/or the orange RSS icon.

Please note - Blogs on all standard blogging platforms automatically include RSS feed and won’t necessarily use words or an icon to indicate the presence of the RSS feed.

Options to bring latest student posts to one location include:

1. Feed Readers such as Google Reader and Bloglines
2. Personalized homepages such as NetVibes, PageFlakes, ProtoPage,  iGoogle

Ultimately it’s personal preference whether you use a Personalized homepage or Google Reader.

With personalized homepages you can add a range of different widgets, besides RSS feeds from student blogs, to really customize the page with helpful content for your students.  However, reading posts on a personalized homepage isn’t as easily as reading them via a shared Google Reader folder.

How to Set Up Google Reader

1.  Create a Gmail account (if you don’t have one)

2.  Go to Google Reader and sign in with your Google Account

3.  Add your student blogs, one at a time, to your Google Reader account by:

• Clicking on Add A Subscription
• Entering their blog URL
• Now click Add

3. Next create a folder and place all the student blogs into the folder as follows:

• Click on Manage Subscription (at bottom of page)

• Click on Add to a Folder next to the name of any student blog to create a new folder for your student blogs
• Select New Folder

• Add the name of your folder and then click OK

• Now add all the student blogs to the folder you have created by selecting all the student blogs then clicking on the drop down menu next to More Actions to select the name of your new folder

4. Click Back to Google Reader

How To Read Posts Inside Google Reader

Latest posts from your student blogs will automatically be added to your Google Reader when they’re published and you read them as follows:

1.  Log into your Google Reader account

2.  Click on the name of the folder that contains your student blogs

3.  The number of unread posts is shown in bold next to the name of the folder.

4.   Now just scroll down through the posts in the folder to read their posts.

5.  As you scroll the posts will automatically be marked as read and the number of unread posts listed next to the folder will decrease.

6.  To visit a post to add a comment just click on the post’s title.

How To Share Your Google Folder With Students

The easiest option is to change your folder to public and then share the link to this Google Reader public page as follows:

1.  In your Google Reader account click on Manage Subscription (at bottom of page)

2.  Click on the Folders and Tags Tab

3.  Click on the icon next to private for your folder to change it to public

4.  Click on view public page to check out your public page.  For example, here’s my public page from this demo.

5.  Now share this public page with your students by adding it to your blog roll on your class blog as follows:

• In dashboard of your class blog go to Links > Add New

• Add a title for your Google Reader public page to the Name Module
• Add your Google Reader public page URL to the Web Address Module

• Select Blogroll in the Categories Module and click Add Link

Provided your Links widget is in your blog sidebar this link to your Google Reader public page will appear in your sidebar —and students just need to click on this link to read the latest posts.

For more how-to info on blog rolls read this post!

FINAL THOUGHTS

For those participating in the Student Blogging Challenge:

1. We need all teachers to set up a Google Reader shared folder (or a Personalized homepage) if your class is participating using individual student blogs as we will be linking to these pages from Challenge Yourself to Blog.
2. We recommend you add Challenge Yourself to Blog and The Edublogger to your Google Reader to make it easier to read the latest posts from the Challenge.

Here’s the previous tasks:

1. Week 1 – Create A Class Blog
2. Week 2:  Set Up Your Blogging Rules and Guidelines
3. Week 3 – Add A Visitor Tracking Widget To Your Blog Sidebar
4. Week 4 – Add your student blogs to your blogroll
5. Week 5 – Add Students To Your Class Blog So They Can Write Posts
6. Week 6 – Help Parents Connect With Your Class Blog

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We’ve opened registration for students to register their personal blogs to participate in the challenge which starts in March.

It’s all about having fun, improving your blogging while connecting with a global audience!

About the Student Blogging Challenge

We’re now into our 3rd Year and 4th Challenge.

We provide weekly tasks for 10 weeks to help you connect with student bloggers in other countries and improve your blogging.

It’s a really great way to learn more about each others cultures!

You can read more about it here:

1. About the student challenge
2. Student Blogging Challenge FAQs

Your blog doesn’t have to be hosted on Edublogs to join.

Students using any blogging platform such as 21classes, Blogger, Blogmeister, Wordpress, Primary Blogger, Creative Blogs etc, can participate!

So far 44 Class blogs from 10 countries (Australia, Argentina, Canada, Hong Kong, Mexico, New Zealand, Normay, UK, United Arab Emirates, USA) have registered.

Register your student blog now!

Follow these TWO simple steps to register:

STEP 1:  Register Your Personal Blog Using the Google Form

Complete the Google Form below by adding:

1. Your Name as First name and initial of Surname
2. Your personal blog URL — for example my blog URL is http://theedublogger.com/
3. Country
4. Your age
5. A few of your hobbies  so other students with similar interests can connect with you

Please Note:

• Please register from home if you can’t see the Google Form on your school network!
• You only need to register once!
• If you are having trouble registering please leave comment on this post so we can help you.

STEP 2: Check your registration details!

Go to the March 2010 student page a couple of days after you added your details to the Google Form to check that your name and blog is on the page.

If your name is not there, it’s probably been removed because your blog URL was wrong.

Please note:

• The delay in adding your information to the March 2010 student page is because we need to check your details before adding.
• If your details haven’t been added please leave a comment on this post with your blog URL so we can sort it out for you!

Final Thoughts

Teachers and class blogs need to register following the steps in Student Blogging Challenge – Time for teachers to register their classes.

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Each week for six weeks we’re giving you a new task, with how-to info, to help you with your class blogging.

This week’s task is to help parents connect with your class blog.

Educating Parents and Students About Blogs

Blogs are a totally foreign concept to most students and parents.

It’s important to educate them so they appreciate the value of blogging, support the process  and understand expectations for interacting with the blogs.

Obviously one approach is to set up your blogging rules and guidelines like we did in the Week 2 task. 

However, it’s also a good idea to provide handouts to send home to families. No point having all the information online if they can’t even find the blog!

Examples of Handouts

Here’s two handouts used by Kathleen McGeady for her Grade 2 class blog:

1. Introduction to Blogging Handout explains:

• What is a blog?
• Provides the blog URL
• Online safety rules

2.  Guide to Getting the Most out of 2KM’s Class blog explains:

• How to be automatically notified of  new posts
• How categories are used to make it easier to find their child’s work
• How to leave comments
• How to be notified of new comments on posts
• How to search for content and reminder to check Pages for helpful information
• Connecting and sharing with other classrooms through their class blog

Creating Your Own Handouts

Use Kathleen’s handouts as a guide to the type of info and detail to include — and customise it for your situation and student ages.

A powerful component of her handouts is her use of screenshots.

Here’s a list of screen capture software you could use:

1. MWSnap – free (PC)
2. Jing -  free (PC and Mac)
3. Skitch – free (Mac)
4. SnagIT – US$49.95 (PC) – this is what I use for all my screenshots

Alternatively you could use PrtScrn and paste the image into MS Paint.

Sett Up Email Subscription

With younger students, such as kindergarten to Grade 3, an important aspect of  the class blog is sharing, with parents and family, what’s happening in the class and what the students are learning.

Email subscription makes it easier for parents and other readers to be automatically notified of new posts.

Email subscription is definitely a ‘must have’ widget on class blogs.

There are three main options for adding email subscription to your blog:

1. Feedburner email subscription – all blog users except private blogs
   • Here’s how to set up Feedburner RSS and Email subscription
2. Email Subscription Widget – Edublogs supporters only
3. Subscribe2 email subscription- Edublogs Campus only
   • Here’s how to set up and use Subscribe2

Email Subscription Widget

The email subscription widget (Edublogs supporters only) is the fastest and easiest way of adding email subscription to your blog.

It sends an email immediately when the post is published.  Readers click on the link in the email which takes them to the post on your blog.

Adding it is as simple as:

1.  Go to Appearance > Widgets in your blog dashboard

2.  Click on the desired Sidebar to expand (so you can add the widgets)

3.  Drag the Email Subscription Widget from the Available Widgets area into the Sidebar area on the right

• It’s a good idea to locate the email subscription near the top of the sidebar

4.  The widget will automatically open — just add your desired title to the widget\

5.  Presto!  A simple email subscription is now added to your blog sidebar

Final Thoughts

Thanks Kathleen McGeady for sharing your handouts with us! Her blog Integrating Technology in the Primary Classroom is definitely worth subscribing to!

Here’s the previous tasks:

1. Week 1 – Create A Class Blog
2. Week 2:  Set Up Your Blogging Rules and Guidelines
3. Week 3 – Add A Visitor Tracking Widget To Your Blog Sidebar
4. Week 4 – Add your student blogs to your blogroll
5. Week 5 – Add Students To Your Class Blog So They Can Write Posts

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