About Rhonda Carrier

Rhonda is an international educator who has worked in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Jordan, Japan and the U.S. She has been a ES/MS/HS teacher, head of department, technology director, curriculum coordinator, house parent, university lecturer, adjunct professor.

Create a New Blog Post

To create a new blog post, in your dashboard click on Add New under Posts. Enter a title. Remember to include capital letters since it is a title. Then enter the text for the first paragraph. When you are done, ask the person sitting next to you to quietly proofread. Be sure to spell check. When all corrections are made, click on Submit for Review.

New Grade 7 Blogs

The ICS grade 7 students have created their new blogs for this year. The links to their blogs are in the list of blogs on the right side of this screen. This year’s grade 7 blogs have an * at the start of each blog name.

Last year’s grade 7 blogs are still linked. The names do not have an *. There are three blogs from last year’s grade 8 students that are linked because they will be models for this year’s students. These blogs have three *** at the beginning of the name.

Plagiarism

View Plagiarism on Common Craft

When a citation is not needed

Common sense and ethics should determine your need for documenting sources. You do not need to give sources for familiar proverbs, well-known quotations or common knowledge. Remember, this is a rhetorical choice, based on audience. If you’re writing for an expert audience of a scholarly journal, for example, they’ll have different expectations of what constitutes common knowledge.

Quote from OWL Purdue University

Research: Cite Your Sources of Information

Read – Purdue OWL –  In-Text Citations: the Basics   

With more and more scholarly work being posted on the Internet, you may have to cite research you have completed in virtual environments. While many sources on the Internet should not be used for scholarly work (reference the OWL’s Evaluating Sources of Informationresource), some Web sources are perfectly acceptable for research. When creating in-text citations for electronic, film, or Internet sources, remember that your citation must reference the source in your Works Cited.

Sometimes writers are confused with how to craft parenthetical citations for electronic sources because of the absence of page numbers, but often, these sorts of entries do not require any sort of parenthetical citation at all. For electronic and Internet sources, follow the following guidelines:

  • Include in the text the first item that appears in the Work Cited entry that corresponds to the citation (e.g. author name, article name, website name, film name).

  • You do not need to give paragraph numbers or page numbers based on your Web browser’s print preview function.

  • Unless you must list the Web site name in the signal phrase in order to get the reader to the appropriate entry, do not include URLs in-text. Only provide partial URLs such as when the name of the site includes, for example, a domain name, like CNN.com orForbes.com as opposed to writing out http://www.cnn.com or http://www.forbes.com.

Quotes from Purdue OWL

Do You Want More Readers?

Students, you are writing and getting readers, but how do you increase the number of readers and bring visitors back on a regular basis to read your blog?

Please read Get to Work! You’ll find that one of the ways to increase the number of readers on your blog is to read other blogs and to comment on them. A monologue doesn’t interest people as much as a conversation does.

Go to the Edublogs Community page. Find a student or class blog that seems interesting. Try to comment on the page. Remember to be a good digital citizen. Remember that with each comment, you represent Incarnation Catholic School. Remember that the comment may be moderated and may not show up on the blog until a teacher approves the comment.

Communicating with Edublogs via Twitter

Last Friday, one of my grade 7 students came in during recess to work on his blog. He was shocked to find he had no posts. I knew he had had posts just a half hour earlier, so was surprised myself. Then I checked my blog and I had no posts. What??? I am learning to manage student blogs, so my first concern was that I had accidentally deleted the posts. Since, I’ve been blogging for years, that didn’t seem likely. I realized that as unlikely as it sounded, that there might be something wrong at Edublogs, but what was the most efficient way to find out?

I turned to a Twitter as my communication tool. I sent the following message at 12:36 PM “@edublogs Where are my blog posts & student posts? http://bit.ly/gOvEIu  Help!!! ”

At 12:40, I received this reply, “@rhondacarrier Sorry for inconvenience. We had temporary server hiccup that is resolving now.”

What a relief. I went back to teaching and by the end of the next class, 45 minutes later, the blog posts were back in place.

Thank-you to Edublogs for the prompt reply and thanks to Twitter for being my communication tool.

Clustr Maps

ClustrMaps help to track the number of visitors to each blog and show the location of the visitors. To add a clustrmap to your student blog, visit the clustr maps website, enter the URL of your blog, copy the embed code and place it in a text widget in a sidebar of your blog. This requires the use of an email account to receive the password

This version in the link below uses built in plugins in the Edublog dashboard but requires an Edublog Pro or Edublog campus account.

Note: I added the clustrmaps to each of the blogs in the class. That way I control the password and the clustrmpas account but the students can see how many visitors they have on their blogs.