So you are thinking about taking part in the Student Blogging Challenge in October 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 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 mid February and mid 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  #16stubc

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 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 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 ready for the October challenge?

  1. Hi,
    We love Edublogs and for the past 2 years our Year 6 students have had their own blog attached to our class blog. We have found that the March challenge is a little early for us as girls have just started the new year and the October challenge begins while they are on holidays and they only have a few weeks in last term which is really busy.
    In an effort to rectify this, I have created a ‘student blog challenge’ on out class blog, based on the Edublogs challenge and given full credit to Edublogs and all contributors. This means that our girls have already got started. They have done, All about me, Avatar post and some research and posting about creative commons.
    If they participate in the October challenge, which I would love them to, they will already be underway and so could possibly start the challenges a little further into the challenge. They will get more out of the challenge because they will already be underway before the term winds up. What do you think about this? I am happy to be a mentor.
    Kind regards,
    Heather Davis

    1. Hi Heather,
      Thanks for offering to be a mentor, I will allocate some students to you if you could leave a comment on the mentor page as well. Your girls can use any of the posts from the previous challenges and if I do a different one while they are still at school in 2016, they could join in then.

      1. Hey miss W,
        I think that you have a great blog. I hope that you can leave a comment on my blog it would mean so much to me. Again thank you. Bye.

  2. Thank you, Miss W, for faithfully enhance, every semester, this extraordinary way of allowing students to collaborate and share in a global perspective: this is an excellent example of how to build Peace for a better world.
    I hope to participate as a mentor and also to inspire some students of mine to come in the challenge.
    I wish you all the best in this adventure!
    Ines

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