5/6C’s Class Blog 2008

Making a graph of information can often help to give a clearer picture of what data you have or how parts of it connect to other parts. We’ve made graphs of our height, how we use our time, temperature over a day and many other sets of data. Here’s a new twist on graphs though – graph your website!

Plugging your site’s URL into this page will produce a graph of your content – it’s really interesting to watch the picture being constructed on your screen. I made graphs of our blog and our wiki; they look quite different, because the structure of each site is so different.  If you want to see some more amazing shots, there are more than two thousand posted here on Flickr.

  Here is another interesting tool which converts your site to a picture that looks like a DNA sample. According to the site,  ”WEB2DNA will take you website, analyze it, crunch it to little bits and spit it out as a graphic representation of a human DNA.” I think the most interesting part of this is, like the graphs above, comparing the pictures of different sites. Here are the WEB2DNA pictures of our blog and wiki:

 There are hundreds of other examples of sites pictured with WEB2DNA here on Flickr. 

So, has anyone found any other cool sites that change your webpages to graphics? Please let us know if you have!

Mrs C has been playing with a new tool, Zoho Creator. It’s tricky but she thinks she’s got the basics worked out, sort of anyway. She used the tool to make the Blog user survey below – please fill in the form! Thanks,

The first week of the holidays is almost over already – as the saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun! What is everyone up to in the holidays?

This illustration was made using Spell with Flickr. A very cool tool. The images used are from Flickr groups which specialise in collecting photos of letters, digits and punctuation marks.  I found the link on Division 16’s blog, Huzzah. They are a grade 6 class in Canada who have been blogging for a couple of weeks. They have a great blogroll which includes many student and grade blogs, including ours!

We’ve been working on our wiki, so now there are pages made by most of our students. Some people have posted VoiceThreads, others have adopted cyberpets and some students have a whole array of different items. It still early days, but we are loving the ease with which we can publish on a wiki. Come and visit on the link below:

Glitter Text Generator

Today we had a visit from our 50th country, according to Google Analytics. Most of our visits have been from Australia (of course!), with the United States second and Canada and the United Kingdom pretty much tied for third. There are many countries from which we have had only one visit, most of which do not have English as their first language. I wonder how many of these visitors have used our translation widget?

On the map pictured above, the darker the color the more visits we have had from that country. We are a bit light on for African visitors, and we’d love someone from Russia to visit – that would color a huge section of our map! Is anyone able to help us out with visitors from new places?

We’ve been working on VoiceThreads for a couple of weeks now. The process was this:

1. Plan the Story. This involved designing a storyboard with a section for each part of the story – these sections became the pages of our VoiceThread.
2. Draft the Script. This is where we took our initial ideas and turned them into a more detailed story. We planned what we would say in our recordings.
3. Finding Pictures. Then we spent ages collecting the pictures we needed to tell our story. We got them from a range of sources: Flickr, ToonDoo, Microsoft Paint, our own photographs, Kid Pix and our own drawings.
4. Redraft the Story. Then we checked that our story matched the pictures we had found. We made changes to the script so that it sounded fantastic.
5. Produce the VoiceThread. We uploaded our photos to our own VoiceThread and then added our voice comments. Most of us remembered to switch user to our own username, but a couple of us forgot!
6. Embed in your Blog. We had trouble with this because our own blogs are on Learnerblogs and VoiceThread won’t embed into them. Sad.   So we are embedding them into this blog on our VoiceThread page and putting a link on our own blogs so people can find our work.

Image: RuneT on Flickr

This site, ClassTools, is a great way to make Flash games, activities and diagrams which can then be easily put on your blog. Best of all, you don’t have to sign up for anything – just get on there and play! Here’s a Venn diagram I put together in just a couple of minutes; it’s much quicker than the involved diagrams we did earlier this year, although they did look better.

Click here for full screen version

Here’s a great program to make easy comic strips with; it’s called ToonDoo. Grade 5/6C, you can use this program to make comics after you have drafted a storyboard of your planned comic. First though, it’s always a good idea to have a play. So follow this link to ToonDoo, then click on the blue Tools tab. Go to the top choice, ToonDoo Maker. It will ask you to log in – use the username and password that is in our Collaborate forum.

1. Use our class username and password, and start ‘tooning! (Remember the rules – polite, clean and friendly).
2. When you are done, save it and view it.
3. When viewing, you’ll see a group of icons on the right hand side of your cartoon. Click on the bottom one, “Embed in your blog”. Copy the bottom set of code.
4. Make a new post in your blog. Give it a heading and do any typing you want about your cartoon. Then go to the HTML tab on the top right of the editing section. Click below any typing you have done and then paste (right click to paste, or CTRL+V) the code in. Save your post and voila! You’re a published cartoonist!
5. If your cartoon is too big to fit in your blog, you can also save the cartoon as a picture. Save it to your own work folder, then you can upload it to your blog as you would any other picture. This option lets you resize the cartoon to fit your blog.
6. Post a note in the collaboration forum to let us know you have a cartoon done.

Mrs C has set up Google Analytics to look at the statistics and information of our site’s visitors. Since April 5, we have had visitors from 33 different countries! If you are a visitor from anywhere other than our school, please post a comment telling us where you are from and how you found us. Here are our visitor stats for the last 11 weeks, according to Google Analytics:

As well as these multiple visits, we had single visits from Malaysia, Philippines, Romania, Dominican Republic, Turkey, Norway, Denmark, United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, Pakistan, Thailand, Bangladesh, Slovakia, Poland and Israel.

How lucky for us! Mrs C has received an email telling her that we have been selected as a ClustrMaps “User of the Month“. For the next TWO YEARS we will be upgraded to a ClustrMaps Plus account, for free! A Plus account will let us click on the map to show a zoomed in shot of where our visitors have come from, continent by continent. It will start to work at our next map upgrade, which should be any day now.

This is what our ClustrMap looks like today, June 13, 2008: