This is our last post for the Student Blogging Challenge until we start again in March 2017. Miss W hopes you have enjoyed the activities and the chance to make connections with other students and classes around the world.

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 two things to do:

1. Evaluate your own blog
2. Evaluate the actual blogging challenge

1. This is an audit of your blog since the beginning of October 2016.

• 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 a student, teacher, or parent from your school who has 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 seventeenth challenge and sometimes Miss W feels 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, Miss W 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)

Miss W usually has a form to fill in here but this time she 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

Thanks again for taking part in this challenge. Hopefully, you will take part again in March next year.

Keep writing, keep reading the magazine, and if you have a great post you would like Miss to add to the magazine over the Christmas break, feel free to leave a comment here.

Mike Trimble via Compfight

So we are one week away from the end of the challenge! As some schools finish soon, Miss W will be posting the last challenge early this week instead of next weekend. Look out for it around Wednesday.

Do you think you have improved your blogging skills since you began earlier this year?

Now is your chance to show off.

Activity 1

Write the very best post you can for your teachers and visitors to read.

Remember essentials for a great post:

1. Catchy title
2. Includes at least one visual (with attribution) whether photo, cartoon, video or another web 2.0 tool like padlet or glogster
3. Interesting topic with the passion of the author coming through
4. Well written and not copy/pasted from somewhere else
5. Shows it has been proofread and spellchecked
6. Written in paragraphs – at least three of them
7. Includes links to other websites on similar topics – at least two of these
8. Ends with a question to lure your visitors into leaving a comment

Your choice of topics:

• Favorites – eg music, author, colour, holiday etc Just write about one of these.
• Science – any topic within science – astronomy, chemistry, physics, the environment, animals etc
• Travel – where to go, where you have been, future travel, what to take when travelling, planning a trip etc

When you have finished your post and your teacher has published it, then return here to leave a link to the post. We still have some students just leaving a link to their blog rather than the exact post.

Activity 2

Do you have a favourite blog (not from your class though) that you visit often?

Write a post about that blog and why you keep going back there. Does the author deserve to be nominated in the Edublogs Awards? Give reasons for you nominating them.

 

Still got time left? Then visit other blogs and leave quality comments. Read the Flipboard magazine and visit posts to leave comments on.