Miss W. and her Smartboard

From September to December 2008, with the help of Sue Waters, I ran an international student blogging competition. This included about 500 students and classes from 9 countries of the world.  If you are thinking of doing something similar, then please remember to check out the following:

Advertising – How will the students know the competition is on?

I used my PLN and mentioned to teachers I was in contact with, my idea of a competition.  In my class blog, I put in a google form for students to fill in with details needed about them.  Sue Waters wrote a post in the Edublogger.  We started advertising in early August with the competition to start mid September when I went back to school.

Organization – How will the students know what to do?

On my class blog, there were separate pages for information, links to each participant and class blog, recent post feed from all participating blogs and weekly activities.  Most teachers also wrote a post in their class blogs reminding students how to get the activities to participate.

Comments – How will we connect with the students?

Over the ten week period, I tried to comment on each students’ blog at least three times – firstly to welcome them to the competition and give them the URL for the activities, then if they wrote a post about Blog Action Day and finally when the competition finished. It was easy to keep in touch using the RSS feed that Sue Waters had set up.  We also asked members of our PLNs to visit blogs and often tweeted about some very interesting posts written by the students.

Translating – How will the students comment using different languages?

We had three classes from Portugal taking part and they were mainly writing in Portuguese.  My class blog had google translator widget included and I wrote a post about how to communicate with the Portuguese students. The teacher in Portugal Stora Ines, translated all posts from either Sue Waters or my class blog that related to the competition or would be of help to her new bloggers.

Activities – What will the students write and comment about?

I had taken part in the comment challenge and felt that a challenge every week would be more suitable for students who might only get one chance a week to use a computer at school. As many of the students had been blogging less than thee months, I thought some activities about setting up their blog would be useful as well as writing and researching posts about certain topics that would be global in nature. Some of the activities included creating an avatar, setting up a blogroll and how to make new connections.

Winners – How will we choose the winners?

As neither myself or the other teachers could offer a large prize for an overall winner, the competition was run within each school.  The teacher who had registered was to organize a small prize (up to each teacher) to give to the most improved blogger and the keenest blogger over the ten week period. The winners are now on the blogroll of our new blog (see below).

After the competition – How do students keep in touch now?

Many students wanted to carry on the conversations and friendships, so after many discussion , we now have a new blog run by the teachers and students who took part in the 2008 blogging competition. If you and your class want to join us please visit the new blog and comment under the join us page.