Week 10: So long, farewell

And the wind carries them off, and all of the hope in their hearts is carried with them until they are gone...

Dee Ashley via Compfight

 

This is our last post for the Student Blogging Challenge until we start again next year in March 2016. I hope you have enjoyed the activities and the chance to make connections with other students and classes around the world.

I would like to thank Sue Waters from Edublogs for writing a few of the challenges this time, but also thank the mentors for taking time to visit and comment on student blogs.

We have had a great 10 weeks of blogging. You have learnt so many skills to help you improve your blogs. Many of you have improved those writing skills or maybe digital skills with using a variety of tools to embed on your blog. But it is now time to evaluate your progress as well as the progress of the blogging challenge itself.

This week there are three things to do:

  1. Evaluate your own blog
  2. Evaluate the actual blogging challenge
  3. Keep watching for the post from Edublogs about voting for the best student and class blogs

1. This is an audit of your blog since the beginning of October 2015.

  • How many posts did you write?
  • How many were school based, your own interests or set by the challenge?
  • How many comments did you receive from classmates, teachers or overseas students?
  • Which post received the most comments? Why do you think that happened?
  • Which post did you enjoy writing the most and why?
  • Did you change blog themes at all and why?
  • How many widgets do you have? Do you think this is too many or not enough?
  • How many overseas students do you have on your blogroll?
  • Which web tools did you use to show creativity on your blog?

Now ask another student and teacher/parent from your school who might not have read your blog to do an audit.

Sit beside them while they navigate around your blog, record what you observe as they interact with your blog. When finished, ask them the following questions:

  1. What were your first impressions of this blog?
  2. What captured your attention?
  3. What distracted you on the blog?
  4. What suggestions can you give me to improve my blog?

Write a post about your blog audit.

2. Evaluating the challenge.

This is the fifteenth challenge and sometimes I feel like the activities are getting stale especially for those students who have taken part in more than one set of challenges. So over the next few weeks I will be adding new pages that you all can contribute to. Every month of the year, there are special events, festivals, birthdays of authors etc. Which ones do you think it would be interesting to write about? Find the post ideas page for that month and add your ideas in the comments. (These are found above the header area)

I usually have a form to fill in here but this time I would like you to leave a quality comment giving your opinion of the challenge. You might want to mention some of the following things:

  • the most interesting challenge for you
  • how often you visited other blogs and left comments
  • whether you read the challenge flipboard magazine
  • a PMI or plus/minus/interesting point about the challenge
  • the most important thing you learnt while doing the challenge

3. Voting for blogs – I will include a link here when I know more about the voting for the best class and student blogs. I know there were nearly 400 nominations for student blogs and about two hundred for class blog. The team at Edublogs have had to short list these down to about 40 in each category, so if you were nominated congratulations. If you made it to the shortlist for students then your blog will have been nominated many times or will have at least 10 posts or will show great conversations in the comments.

If you missed out on the shortlist for this year, keep your blog going next year, keep making connections with students around the world and perhaps you will make the shortlist for 2016.