Don’t miss out! The Student Blogging Challenge is starting soon and is a great way to connect your students with a global audience while helping develop their blogging skills.
The Student Blogging Challenge is run twice a year beginning in March and October. It is made up of a series of 10 weekly tasks which you can customize for your class.
It is organized by Sue Wyatt (@tasteach) with help from me, Sue Waters, and the team at Edublogs.
There are three registration forms:
- Educators who would like to mentor a group of students
- Teachers who have a class blog who want to connect with other classes globally
- Individual students who have their own personal blog and want to connect globally with other students
The Challenge is open to both class blogs and to individual student bloggers from all over the world and of all ages – blogs don’t need to be hosted by Edublogs to participate, but your blog must be public.
The Weekly Activities
Each week a post is published on the Student Blogging Challenge blog with a list of activities for students to choose from. The students only need to complete one activity each week, but if they want to do more they can.
During the challenge students learn about:
- Creating pages and posts
- Creating avatars
- Digital citizenship
- Commenting skills
- Connecting with students globally
- Using tools and embedding on their blog
Some weeks are the similar every time the challenge is run – that is because they are important skills for both teachers and students to have.
- About me – creating their avatar and about me page so visitors get to know them – includes being digital citizenship and cybersafety
- Let’s comment – teaching what makes a quality comment, how to connect through commenting and again cybersafety and digital citizenship
- Using images – teaches about using creative commons images, giving attribution for images, videos etc, tools for using images in posts
The other weeks of the challenge are based around a topic such as food, games, government, history, maths, nature.
To Register
There are two ways to register:
- Class blog registration form – teachers with a class blog who want to connect with other classes around the World.
- Student blog registration form – student with own individual student blog.
To Help
There have been over 1300 students in the last few challenges and it isn’t possible for Sue Wyatt to visit them all regularly.
Can you help?
You might be a teacher, principal, educational coach, parent, retired teacher or a trainee teacher and would like to get involved with student blogging. You can register as a mentor and help mentor small groups of 10-30 students during the challenge.
Register Now!
Think you might be interested in joining the March 2016 Student Blogging Challenge?
Is it to late to join the challenge?
Hi Michelle,
If you have a class blog, register that under the classes. If you have students on the sidebar of your class blog, they can still take part even if they don’t register their personal blogs.