Lots of choices again this week in the challenge.
1. Create an avatar for your blog and for you to use when leaving comments.
Avatars are a representation of yourself. Check out this post about avatars. Create your avatar using one of the websites below. Sue Waters from ‘The Edublogger‘ has written a great post about avatars, including giving instructions on how to save them and then upload to an ‘Edublogs’ blog. Many of the sites mentioned below are included in her post. If using
Most important is remember to save as a jpeg file.
![MyHero[1]](http://studentchallenge.edublogs.org/files/2010/03/MyHero1.jpg "MyHero[1]")
Any age can use these avatar sites:
- Build your wild self – middle left
- DoppelMe
- Mini-mizer – middle right
- The Hero Factory – far left
- Adventurer Maker – girls only
- Wimp yourself - relates to ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid’
- Mess Dudes
- Hogwarts student – girls only
- Mii character
- Harry Potter and others saves as GIF
- Caracature
- Block head – like Lego
2. Create a quick brief tour of your classroom or school (walking around showing the grounds/playgrounds/classroom) and then embed it or upload it to the classroom blog. You might use vimeo , a slideshow, photopeach, YouTube, Smile Box etc. Next week visit other classes who did the same activity and compare your schools or classrooms. Thanks Mr Webb for this suggestion. WE WILL DO THIS TOGETHER IN CLASS – I JUST WANTED YOU TO SEE WHAT WE WERE GOING TO DO!!!!! 
3. In a post, please answer this question: When do you think it is appropriate for students to use real photos of themselves on their blogs and why? See if you can research this on the net and find responses from other educators. Remember to link to their post if you use information they mentioned. Hyperlink as well to this challenge post, so I can read your answers.
I think students should be aloud to use a photo of themselves is when you do not know what there user name is.
I think students should NOT put a photo of themselves because bad people could find you.
webwisekids.org
I agree that posting our pictures could make us more vulnerable to intruders. If we were going to use our own photos, we should make sure our user name is very different from our real name.
I think students should use a photo of themselves on the blog when you don’t know what their username is. I also think they should NOT because people can go looking for you and hurt or put your picture on the web and everyone can see it.
I think that students should NEVER use their real photos because hackers could get in and find out who the student is. They might also be able to find the students’ locations and all their personal information. Also, people could download the student’s photo to use for advertisements and other inappropriate things. I think that the best way to deal with this is to get a picture of one’s hobby or make an avatar.
http://www.wspra.org/studentswebsitesblogsandtoomuchinformation.html
http://familyinternet.about.com/od/computingsafetyprivacy/a/Safe_to_post_photos_of_kids_online.htm
This website shows an example of a real picture being used for an advertisement:
http://familyinternet.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=familyinternet&cdn=parenting&tm=853&f=00&su=p284.9.336.ip_&tt=2&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/24/tech/main3290986.shtml%3Fsource%3DRSSattr%3DSciTech_3290986
I agree with what NagaChess said becuase people could hurt us from the web or phisically.
I don’t think it is ever appropriate for a student to put their picture on a blog. A bad person can track you down if they know what you look like. They can also take your picture and do things with it on the Internet. They talk about this kind of stuff happening at this website: familyinternet.about.com.
I don’t think people should put their photos because someone that is bad could figure out who you were.
I think students should not put there pictures on the blog because if somebody sees your picture they could look you up and find your house.
I think people should not put their picture because strangers can see it and might want to harm you.
I couldn’t find anything on the web about when or when not you should so I’ll do what I think! You should never put up a picture of yourself on a blog if it is public. It is for many safety reasons! I think you can put up a pic. of yourself when the blog is private and you can’t see it without a certain password or an account!
I think that it is not appropriate because we are only kids and if we put photos of ourselves on the internet along with all the information on us on the blog we could end up meeting someone that we don’t want to see. However, I love the fact that we were able to make avatars and put them on the blog in the place of a photo.
I do NOT think that students should geta real picture of themselves because someone could find you. But I also think students SHOULD because if and ONLY if thier username is not anywhere near thier real name.
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/parents/social/kidssocial.aspx
This has some good info on why kids should not post pictures of themselves on the internet.
I think that it would be appropriate to use a photo of them selves when it would not be posted on the web but it would be okay if no one will be able to see it but you. Another reason is that everyone looks at blogs from around the world.
Cathryn
If teachers want students to use photos of themselves, they should make sure that all of the privacy settings are set to “only friends.” Unfortunately, the privacy setting may not be enough to protect us from intruders. If a child’s photo is on his/her blog, the intruder would know the general age of the student and what he or she looks like. My parents are cautious about the net, and are especially cautious about our privacy. :0) A good website to look at is doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog. It tells a lot about class blogging. :0)
I think that it is never appropriate for a student to post a picture of themselves on a blog. I believe this because of the danger of bad people being able to track the student down. By knowing the students face and having their name, the bad person could find their address in a directory and haunt them forever.