As the second last week of the blogging challenge, this is your chance to visit lots of other blogs and leave comments on great posts you read. In previous weeks, you have had lots of chances to write your own posts. If you haven’t then maybe start writing some excellent posts relating to your interests in life before you play the game.
How to play the game.
Step 1: Visit the participants page of the student blogging challenge.
Step 2: Right click on a link to a student blog, open in a new tab. Make sure this is not a student in your class – preferably another country.
Step 3: Read at least three posts on their blog and leave a quality comment on one of those posts. If there are no really interesting posts, go back and choose another student from the challenge.
Step 4: Take note of the URL of the blog and the post you left the comment on, as these will be added to a post you will write about the game.
Step 5: Look on the blogroll of this student. Right click open in a new page, a link from this blogroll. Try to get someone who is not from their class. Often teachers will use a pattern eg s600 or hz2 at the end of a student name when they create the blogs.
Step 6: Do steps 3, 4 and 5 until you have visited and left 3 comments.
Play this game at least three times – you will have left 9 comments on 9 different posts, hopefully from 9 students not in your class.
Write a post about your visits. What type of posts did you find interesting? What did you say in your quality comments? Which countries did you visit? Did students have blogrolls that included students from other countries or were they mainly their own classmates? Be sure to include a link to the actual post you wrote your comment on eg I visited Sue’s post about the “Count Out Three” game.
Still got more time? Go back to each of your posts – Have you included tags and categories? Do images have attribution? Are the posts written in paragraphs which makes it easier for visitors to read?
Teachers:
We would like you to do something special for Sue Waters and Ronnie Burt from Edublogs. You can be using any blogging platform to do this activity. Please visit this website to fill in a survey about the state of educational use of blogs in 2012. Statistics such as those gathered in the survey are important for educators to use when talking blogging with their school administrators.
Next week there will be a chance to tell us your thoughts about the student blogging challenge. Please think about the PMI – positives, negatives and interesting aspects of the challenge. We will be using that information at ISTE2012 in San Diego where the student blogging challenge will have a poster session – please visit us if you are attending and introduce yourselves to me, Sue Wyatt (the grey haired lady avatar) as well as the other presenters.
Attribution:
PDF 
I am a middle school teacher who retired in 2012 but still loves teaching. In my spare time I enjoy tracing my family history and helping others with their genealogy as well as chatting with my friends around the world. But most of all, I enjoy travelling and visiting new places.
Hello,
I love this blog. I’v looked at some of your students blogs before and left a comment and it was really good. I would like it if you could go onto my challenge blog and do this weeks challenge at:
http://www.chloejb.edublogs.org
Thank you.
From Chloe.