The second challenge is available now, however carefully read my instructions below as I have specific instructions that are modified from the official challenge page (and, believe me, this is worth your time to read, a little less work, too).

This week, the theme is It’s a Small World. You know, like the ride at Disneyland (or Disneyworld for those of you who are lucky enough to have traveled to Florida). Anyway, there are four things you need to do this week:

Activity 1. Create a new widget, a voki, by following the directions here. While you’re at it, make sure you have the widgets we’ve already included in our blog design: International Blogging Challenge Badge, Clustrmap, and Links.

When adding widgets to your sidebar, go to your dashboard>appearance>widgets> drag text box to sidebar area. Now copy and paste the embed code into your text box.

• Save then close.
• If the widget is too wide, you will have to adjust the number next to ‘width’ in the embed code.
• This might appear more than once in the code.

Activity 2. So that you are known globally, you need to have an avatar that represents you. While it doesn’t automatically show up on your blog (you can add the avatar widget if you like, that’s up to you), it does show up when you comment on another student’s blog.

• But can’t I use a picture from Google?
• No, most pictures on Google or other search engines are copyright and belong to someone else.

So here is a fun activity to create an image that represents you. Here is a post with links to lots of different avatar sites and here is a post for Edublogs or wordpress explaining how to upload your avatar.

Activity 3.  Write a post responding to this question: If I were to visit your state or province, what would be the ‘must see’ places and why? Do you have your own pictures (without you in them, of course, sorry!) that could add something to your post. Remember, this is not the time to grab pictures randomly from Google Search without permission, but you may use your own personal pictures.

Activity 4. Create a quiz (at least 4 questions) about your state, country; this website is good for embedding a quiz. Include it in the post you finished for Activity 3. Try Mrs. W’s quiz about Tasmania…

When you’re finished start visiting other student blogs (both BMS students and International Blogging Challenge students), read their about pages, and leave a quality comment (remember how we worked on strong commenting with peer editing, use that knowledge here, too) on those you find especially interesting. Remember, the student with the most visitors (based on their Clustrmap) will receive 5 points of extra credit this week.

Remember, head back to this week’s challenge post and leave a comment when your post and embedded quiz are ready. I’ll try to approve these every evening to help move this along a bit faster. Include the URL of the actual post not just your blog in general. By the way, if you didn’t do this for the first week’s challenge, please do so. Right now!