We have officially hit April and Spring has sprung! We are starting this week with Communication Arts MAP testing, as well as a short week. Don’t forget there is no school on Friday and Monday for spring weekend! Plus, can you believe this beautiful weather we are having right now. A few things to think about this week:

1. We are getting ready to hit our 1000th visitor to our blog. What country do you think they will visit us from? Leave your guess here for a chance to win a prize!

2. Blogging Challenge Week 5: Our blogging challenge this week deals with adding images that are not copyrighted to our posts. Here are some specifics:

Week 5: Adding images and attribution Posted by Miss W. What is this? If you didn’t take the photo, then someone else did. Some photographers get paid money for taking images to use in newspapers, so often online newspapers copyright their images. This means you would have to pay money or have the photographer’s permission to use that photo on your blog.

Why? Your blog is in the public domain and is available for anyone to see. You are not allowed to put copyright images on your blog without the permission of the owner. This means you need to find images that are creative commons instead.

Below is a list of websites that have creative commons images. Remember attribution doesn’t include a URL beginning with http://images.google.com/ or some other search engine. Attribution is the URL of the original image.

■Flickrcc
■Wikimedia commons – check how you can search for an image, sound, video
■Compfight – check out their FAQ
■Behold – another way to search from Flickr
■Pics4learning
■Morguefile
■Edupics
■FreeFoto
■ImageAfter
■Photos8

Students:
Write a post about your Spring break or Easter holiday. Include at least one image that is creative commons. Include the attribution at the bottom of the post. Here is a post to show you how to insert an image.

Do you think you should have a creative commons license for your blog? Why or why not? Is your audience mainly students in your class and/or the blogging challenge or have you had readers that are teachers and/or visitors you don’t know?

Visit ten blogs from students in the challenge of different ages. How many of these blogs had images with attribution? How many blogs did not have images at all? Which blogs did you prefer to read and why? Leave your answer here as a comment or leave a comment on each of the blogs you visited.

Create a visual post using no more than eight images – where the images tell a story. Remember to give attribution for the images you used. No writing in this post other than the title and attribution.

From Bill Ferreirae – I sometimes find a picture and tell students to use that picture to come up with a story. It can be about the picture, what happened before, what will happen next, etc. So, at the top of the student activities is the image I have chosen for you to start with. Copy the image to your post, then write the story. Remember to give attribution. If you don’t have your own blog, tell your story in a comment here.

From EileenG – Pick one, or more of your ethnic backgrounds and post about the culture. ANYTHING! Food, religions, sports, festivals, languages, etc. Include a picture of the place in the country/region posted about.

Be creative with regard to images – create a collage on a topic or colour etc, use glogster or animoto or prezi. Just remember you must link back to the original image and give attribution for any images used.

3. And of course, don’t forget about the Decorah eagles! All three eggs have hatched, and we have enjoyed watching the mother and father eagle deliver their prey. So far, the eaglets have been fed a sparrow, a frog, an opossum, a squirrel, and many fish. I wonder what will show up next? We can expect the eaglets to fly away in around 8 weeks.