Student+Blogging+Challenge+-+my+experience

In the beginning of September I came across the call for participants in Student Blogging Challenge.

[|The Student Blogging Challenge]  runs twice yearly and is made up of a series of 10 weekly tasks all designed to improve blogging and commenting skills while connecting students with a global audience and being supported by a team of blogging mentors. The Challenge is open to both class blogs and to individual student bloggers from all over the world and of all ages. Participants can complete as many of the tasks as they like and in any order. The next Student blogging challenge starts on 9 Sept. You can register for the September 2012 Challenge using the following links:
 * 1) [|Register your class blog]  - for teachers to register their class blog
 * 2) [|Register your student blog]  – for students to register their personal student blog (optional)
 * 3) [|Register as a mentor]  – if you are an educator who would like to mentor a group of students. Excellent for learning more about the blogging while supporting student bloggers.

I decided to participate with a few of my individual students (since I'm not working at school now) and my 8 y.o. daughter Kristina. As a platform for blogging I chose Kidblog.org I registered our English Together class as a whole and each student separately. There was also a possibility to register as a mentor and supervise some group of students in the challenge but I thought that I needed more experience for that.

It's been the fifth week of the challenge so I can already share some observations and reflections about this project.

My students weren't prepared for taking part in a project like this, they were even new to the idea of blogging, leave alone writing quality posts and comments. Being aware of this, I was making all the posts and writing comments together with them (in most cases, me typing the post and them sitting next to me giving the ideas and translating simple sentences into English). In these five weeks, we've written some interesting posts about our country, our town, sports and health, our hobbies and our pets. Some of my students have already found blogging buddies and comment on each other's posts. Here's my post with the summary of the first 5 weeks of the challenge []
 * Our posts**

They enjoy seeing their posts online, getting comments and visitors from all over the world. I could even say that the process of writing about themselves with me increases their self-satisfaction, self-confidence. Most of them didn't really know what to write about their hobbies at first. While we were searching for the topic to write about we discovered lots of talents, interesting collections and exciting hobbies. The sad fact is that they aren't really interested in learning about other students and writing quality comments to them. I see now how important it is to prepare students to the idea of blogging and making connections before the project starts.
 * My students**

Other students

Spam On the fourth-fifth weeks of the challenge we started receiving quite a lot of spam comments. I'm feeling really lucky that we're using Kidblog because all comments go through my hands before they appear on my students' blogs. If students were to deal with spam on their own, it would be difficult for them to distinguish a smap comment from a real student's comment and it would be discouraging to be getting so much spam to their wonderful posts.

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