It’s time! The latest student blogging challenge starts September 6 and ends in November –to participate just fill out this registration form on Miss Wyatt’s blog!
About the Student Blogging Challenge
Our last blogging challenge had over 1000 students, from 15 countries, aged 6 to 18 years old, writing posts, commenting and getting to know about each others cultures while improving their blogging skils and connecting to a global audience.
The growth of the students’ blogging skills during each challenge is totally amazing and inspiring; check out these examples of student work.
The Challenge Categories
This time we’ve expanded the challenge into two separate categories; both designed to improved your skills.
Students (or classes) can choose to participate in either or both:
- Better Bloggers Challenge – emphasis on better blogging, improving your blog design and connecting to a global audience
- Better Commenter Challenge – focusing how you write comments, whether you are trying to continue conversations through comments and how to write posts that invite lots of comments
The reason why we’ve added the comment challenge is commenting is an important part of blogging. It’s often where most learnng happens.
Unfortunately educating students on effective commenting practices is hard. We hope to change this while also providing new tasks for students who’ve participated in previous challenges.
What’s Involved
Both the Better Bloggers and Commenters categories will have weekly activities for:
- Students who have their own blog
- Students who don’t have their own blog but want to participate through commenting
- Classes who want to participate through their classroom blog
These weekly activities are designed to improved your skills. Don’t stress if you miss a week — the tasks are designed so they can be completed later!
To participate you need to:
- Discuss with your teacher
- Drop past Miss Wyatt’s blog and register your details
- If you are participating as part of a classroom blog you will need to get your teacher to register your class
- Keep an eye on Miss Wyatt’s blog for the blogging challenge information and your weekly task
Reminder!
Win one of 16 free Edublogs supporter 12 month subscriptions for your own blog or to give away to a reader?
Just write a post and follow these instructions to enter The Edublogger ‘Win It Big’ competition!
If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider 
Subscribing For Free!
11 Comments So Far»
thanks for the oppotunities you are giving to us as students to communicate with you, and learning in the internet.
this site also have a lot of info to help you http://www.sabetsu.com
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Thanks Sue, for publicizing the challenges. In less than a week, we already have students from Australia and USA registered and classes from New Zealand, USA and interest shown from Portugal.
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Sue Waters Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 12:25 am
@Miss W., Never a problem Sue. Always happy to promote. Have a few more extra ideas up my sleeve
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Hi Sue
I’m posting a comment here because I cannot access any of the edublogs forums! and this is the only way I could think of to communicate with an Edublogs support person.
My original problem was that someone or something has hacked my edublogs custom header image. I now have an Indonesian website header instead! I will leave it there until further notice in case your tech people want to get forensic with it!
Then, when I tried to access the forums, even when logged in with my username, I couldn’t start a new thread or reply to an existing one. I have tried Safari, Firefox and IE. The first two click and say “done” even though there’s no change to the page. IE says “done but with errors on the page”.
Nada. Help!
b
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Sue Waters Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 12:19 am
@Nada, I’m happy to investigate but I do need your blog URL. Can you give it to me so I can check it out? Can you also tell me what the header should look like?
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Hi Sue
My URL is
http://kendowebproject.edublogs.org
I worked with our IT dude at school today and we found that when we refreshed the page we got another different header! Seems there is less a hacker problem and more of a ID problem. Are all the headers for my page’s theme stored in the same place? Are they all called “cropped-header.jpg”?
So I fixed my header and it seems fine now. I am a bit worried about the security of my blog’s content.
b (for Ben)
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Sue Waters Reply:
August 27th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
@kendowebproject I can assure you that we haven’t be hacked and have very strong security measures in place. Your blog content is fine. However we do have a very complex image management system and which doesn’t like it if you name images the same on your blogs.
Can I get you to try logging out of your Edublogs account and then try logging into the forum. That should work.
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Oh and I still can’t access the forums, from two different IPs, tried PC and Mac using FF, Saf and IE. b
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Sorry Sue, but I still can’t access the forums, even after manually deleting all edublog-related cookies and re-logging in.
And my custom header has disappeared again! Now it’s just blank, and the file has disappeared from the custom header section of my dashboard.
Perhaps you could email me to save me posting off topic comments here!
sheppard<benjamin<s<@<edumail<vic<gov<au
b
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Sue Waters Reply:
August 31st, 2009 at 4:00 am
@kendowebproject, there is definitely a custom header showing on http://kendowebproject.edublogs.org/ — I think that it is your browser cache with the image header. Can you hold the Ctrl key and then press F5? This will clear the web browser cache on most browsers.
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My name is Jingwen Xue. I am from China. I am living in Oakland with my hasband’s side family. I have two sons. The bigger one is almost three years old, and the little one is eight months. They make me very busy, but they are my sweethearts. In China, I was a interior designer. I liked my job so much. Right now, I am studying English at Laney College. Hopefully, I can find a good job after I studying.
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To do the student blogging challenge do we have to talk to our teacher about it?
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Sue Waters Reply:
September 7th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
@twilightroxs, Ideally you want to make your parents or teacher aware you are participating. I suggest you leave a note on Miss Wyatt’s blog to discuss.
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I realize that we are a bit late in joining this challenge but is it still possible? I have been working with two grades setting up class blogs and would love them to participate and enjoy this journey. We are from Australia and the kids can’t wait to converse with others around the world.
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Sue Waters Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 12:10 am
@Mrs M, Off course never too late. Just pick and choose which tasks you want your students to do and heaps of time to catch up. Each State/Territory has different holidays so it all works out. I expect we will continue to have more signing up over the next few weeks.
Just pop past Sue Wyatt’s blog and add your details.
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how do you add students??? All I find is ads, ads, ads. Buy this, sign up for more money, but zilch on how to add some students and get started.
So this is all about bucks and not about education.
Does anyone know of a site that’s actually useful for EDUCATION?? Or is that archaic these days?
I find this entire site absolutely infuriating. I am agog that anyone signs up for this. SURELY they are completely daffy or desperate or both.
Sue’s help is worthless.
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Sue Waters Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 12:47 am
@Susan, the online world is no different from the f2f world except for the fact that what you write online can remain online i.e. it becomes even more important to think about what you say.
What I’m trying to say is there is an appropriate way to say things and an inappropriate way. I’m sure that if one of your parents, students or fellow educators said to you ‘that what you do is worthless’ you would be both unhappy and upset.
I willingly help people daily regardless of what blogging platform they use or if they need assistance using other Web 2.0 tools. I can understand that information can be hard to find and situations can be frustrating. But that doesn’t make what you’ve said acceptable.
All you needed to do is say ‘Sue, can you help me? I’m not sure how to add students or get started.’ And I would have said here are the instructions for creating and adding students to a blog and you will find all the information for Getting started with your blog here. Then I would have said please let me know if you need more assistance.
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rego_b Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 3:54 am
@Sue Waters,
I have to add that Sue is one of the MOST helpful individuals I have ever met in the online world. It has been such a privilege to “meet” her and receive such an abundance of resourceful information/advice. Sue is not only willing to share her knowledge but also to provide support if requested.
I was appalled to read one of the comments and can only echo Sue’s sentiments. Think before you press the OK or SEND button. There is a human being on the receiving end of such comments.
Bernadette
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Pam Thompson Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 3:02 am
@Susan, when you put it all into perspectve, especially the fact that you can use edublogs at no cost, then the advertising aspect is minimal. I have sued edublogs for 2 years as an educational tool with my class with very positive results. My students are alos now using it independently and loving it.
Of course, there is always the option of becoming an edublogs supporter (for a very small fee) and then you will no longer be troubled by the adverts.
The edublogs forum, and twitter, are amazing places to find support and help. As @suewaters says you only have to ask.
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rego_b Reply:
September 30th, 2009 at 4:03 am
@Susan, I have to add that Sue is one of the MOST helpful individuals I have ever met in the online world. It has been such a privilege to “meet” her and receive such an abundance of resourceful information/advice. Sue is not only willing to share her knowledge but also to provide support if requested.
I was appalled to read one of the comments and can only echo Sue’s sentiments. Think before you press the OK or SEND button. There is a human being on the receiving end of such comments.
Bernadette
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Miss W. Reply:
October 6th, 2009 at 12:11 am
@Susan,
After having worked with @suewaters for nearly two years, I was very disappointed to read your comment. Every time I have had a query about blogging, the first person I go to is @suewaters. She either knows the answer, can lead me to the answer or is prepared to Skype with me for some one to one help.
When you first begin blogging, you have a very steep learning curve as I found out in January 2008 when I began. But with the help of @suewaters and her PLN on twitter and other school teachers on twitter, I could have every question answered within hours.
But as the other commenters have said, there is a correct and an incorrect way to respond in comments. That is one of the first things I teach the students in my class and I am afraid your comment, if written by one of my students, would have had to be modified before I would have moderated it for others to see.
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@Susan- to answer your question about a site that is useful to education– Edublogs, because of the wonderful guidance and never ending assistance that Sue Waters shares 24/7 with everyone! Sue is ALWAYS willing to share her knowledge and resources and I for one am so very thankful for the support she gives. I can understand that technology can, at times, cause us all a little frustration, but the next time you may be feeling a little “daffy or desperate” perhaps you should consider turning off your computer and going for a walk before your fingers type and post untruths for other to read.
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