So you are thinking about taking part in the Student Blogging Challenge in March but you want to know more about it and what it involves.

The basics of the challenge

The challenge is run twice a year beginning first Sunday in March and October for a 10 week period each time.

It is organized by Miss Sue Wyatt (@tasteach) and help is given by Mrs Sue Waters and her team at Edublogs.

There are three registration forms:

  • educators who would like to mentor a group of students – this is usually a post rather than a form
  • 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

Forms are published as posts in late February and September. Once the form is filled in results are shown in the page area above the header. This way you can start connecting immediately.

Students, mentors and classes taking part can add a special challenge badge to their blog.

A twitter hashtag created each year  #17stubc

All blogs must be set to open to the world – the reader doesn’t need a password to leave a comment etc

Blogs can be any platform eg edublogs, wordpress, blogger, weebly, kidblog etc but when full instructions are given in the challenge they will be for edublogs users. There are links on the sidebar to help with other platforms.

The activities each week

Each week a post is published with a list of activities for students to choose from. They only need to complete one activity each week, but if they want to do more they can.

Some weeks are 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 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 eg food, games, government, history, maths, nature etc

The final post for the challenge is an evaluation and audit of what they have done over the 10 week period of the challenge.

 

OK, so you think you might be interested in joining the next set of challenges?

Fill in the Subscribe by email in the sidebar so you will be notified when a new post is published.

Check out the Teacher Challenge run by Edublogs where they give lots of hints about blogging with students

5 thoughts on “Are you getting organized?

  1. Good Morning,

    I am hoping to take part in the Student Blogging Challenge with my students this year. Can you tell me when it will start? I’m just wanting to make sure I have it in my planning.

    Thanks,
    Mr L

  2. Hi Sue,
    My amazing group of student bloggers at Tenambit PS are looking forward to the challenge this year. How soon before they are able to register?
    Susanne Riding

  3. I think only Seesaw users can leave comments. Hopefully other Seesaw users will sign up for the challenge.
    Thanks!

  4. Would love to participate. This year we will be using Seesaw rather than KidBlog. Do teachers list their blog platform? Thanks!

    1. Hi Tammie,
      Have not had anyone using seesaw take part before. Will be interesting if it allows us to see the blog and to leave comments on posts.

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