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Miss Wyatt began blogging in January 2008.  She began with her own personal blog and developed a class blog in March.  By the end of April, most of her students had their own blogs and the class blog was getting less use.

In September that same year, Sue Waters (editor of “The Edublogger”) and Miss W. ran a very successful international student blogging competition.  They had classes from 9 countries taking part involving about 500 students.

It was so successful, that they ran another beginning March 2009.  This was a challenge though, not a competition. This time 15 countries were involved and a total of over 1000 students ranging from grade 2 classes through to students in senior school.

The majority of individual students with their own blog were aged 12-14 while many primary or elementary classes participated using a class blog.

All the information for the blog was found on Miss W.’s class blog pages. There was one page giving links to all the challenges, another page giving links to all the participants and the final page gave a link via a google reader, to all the posts written by the participants.

Challenges were set out once a week on Miss W.’s class blog with the category ‘challenge09′ to make it easy for searching.

Because many students had already taken part in the blogging challenge, it was decided in September 2009 to extend to two challenges – one for better bloggers and another for better commenters.  Over 600 individual students and 80 classes totalling a possible 3000 students registered this time. Again we had participation from 15 countries of the world, some bloggers were only just starting, others had their blogs for over a year.

It is now 2010 and the student blogging challenge has its own blog.

I wonder how these challenges will go?