About The
Challenge
Student Blogging Challenge
From 2008 until 2020 the Student Blogging Challenge ran twice yearly, in March and October, over 8 weeks for students aged about 8-16.
As a result of the pandemic and its impact, the Student Blogging Challenge was paused and switched to a self-paced challenge.
The Student Blogging Challenge is about embracing all of the benefits of publishing online — from learning digital writing skills, and digital citizenship, to developing an authentic audience and connecting with others around the globe.
The challenge is made up of a series of 8 weekly tasks all designed to improve blogging and commenting skills while connecting students with a global audience.
Participants could register as a class, individual student bloggers, or volunteer commenters.
Below are the weekly tasks from the March 2020 challenge.
Challenge History
The Student Blogging Challenge has been running since 2008.
You can see an archive of all the old challenge posts on this archive page.
Sue Wyatt (aka Miss W./Miss Wyatt/Tasteach) is the challenge founder. She is a teacher from Tasmania, Australia. Miss W. began blogging in January 2008. She began with her own personal blog and a few months later had a class blog, then individual student blogs.
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 nine countries taking part involving a total of about 500 students.
It was so successful, they ran another beginning in March 2009. This was a challenge though, not a competition. This time 15 countries were involved and there were a total of over 1000 students ranging from grade 2 classes through to senior high school students.
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. Challenges were sent 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 totaling a possible 3000 students registered this time. Again, there was participation from 15 countries of the world; some bloggers were only just starting, others had their blogs for over a year.
By 2010 it was decided that the Student Blogging Challenge needed its own blog! And this is when this blog was set up.
The challenge now attracts thousands of classes and students bloggers from across the world every March and October.
After the 20th challenge in 2018, Sue Wyatt decided to step down from running the Student Blogging Challenge. Kathleen Morris ran the Student Blogging Challenge with support from the Edublogs team.
Kathleen is a primary school teacher from Victoria, Australia. She has been blogging with CampusPress (Edublogs sister service) since 2008. Kathleen has had class blogs, student blogs, writes a professional educator blog, and is an author on The Edublogger.
Kathleen is a big fan of global collaboration and enjoys connecting with teachers and students from across the world!
In 2019 we also had a wonderful volunteer called Marg Grosfield step up to help with the registration process. The Student Blogging Challenge really is a team effort!
The student blogging challenge was paused in mid-2020 due to the pandemic and its impact.
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