What Makes You Special?

Blogs allow us to share our ideas, perspectives and the things we love with the world!  Each of us is unique and our blogs should reflect what makes us who we are.  Chances are, there are others out there in the world who share your interests and would benefit from your knowledge and participation in the global conversation. Blogging helps us to grow by strengthening our collaboration and communication skills through the connections we make with others.

Your blog is an opportunity to share your take on the world, however, as we've learned in class there's certain information that's not appropriate to share online, especially in a space when anyone in the world can see it.  When posting to our blog or giving feedback on someone's comments we should remember the messages we learned from the videos we discussed in class.

Your job is to determine what information is interesting and appropriate to share with your global audience.  Before we begin blogging, we'll focus on following a set of blogging guidelines developed by our blogging partners at YIS in Yokohama, Japan.  These guidelines will ensure that we don't end up like the students in the videos linked above.

To help us generate ideas for what topics we'll be posting on, we will be creating idea maps using Google Draw.  These idea maps should be well organized and easy to understand as we'll be posting them to our blog in the near future!

To complete your brainstorm for your mission:

Continue to finish the mind map we started in class to demonstrate you thoughts on what your blog will be about.  You can include ideas on what your hobbies are, what sports and activities you participating in, what you like learning about and what you're experiencing in your classes.

Be sure to make your idea map match the rubric by drawing out clear, well-organized and detailed idea branches.  You should use a variety of formatting and grouping techniques to ensure that the map is easy to read and understand.  The more detail you provide on your ideas, the better.

Organizing your ideas in a theme related to your blogging ideas is a great idea too! 

To earn a 7-8 on the rubric, make sure:

• You have created a complex and detailed map.
• Your map is exceptionally well organized.
• Your map utilizes a variety of formatting tools to make it clear and easy to understand.

If you're looking for some inspiration, check out these amazing examples at work:

Tiana (Here use of color and balance makes her information easy to read and understand.)
Chris (Do you notice he's beginning to create a theme that matches his interests?)
Claire (Her idea map is very balanced and makes a good use of color and organization.)
Mahea (Her idea map is very complex and detailed!  She has a technique with color too!)

If you need help understanding how to use the tools in Google Draw, you can watch this youtube video I made a while back called: Concept Mapping with Google Draw