From September to December, 2008, Sue Waters and Sue Wyatt ran an international student blogging competition. About 500 students and their teachers took part by writing posts on class blogs, student blogs or as commenters. The competition was so successful that by the end many of the students and teachers expressed a desire to continue.

So this blog has been created to:

• build on the friendships begun in 2008
• encourage more students and classrooms from throughout the World to connect with each other

How To Get Involved?

As a student or teacher, you can get involved with this blogging project in a range of different ways including:

1. Writing your own posts and/or comments in response to posts on this site.
2. Using ideas from this site for your own blogging and collaboration projects
3. Volunteering for your class to be in charge of this blog for 2 weeks

It’s entirely up to you what level of involvement you choose! But if you are a student please let your teacher know of your involvement with this blog…..

What’s Involved?

If you would like to volunteer for your class to be in charge of this blog for 2 weeks (a fortnight), please contact Sue Wyatt by email and add your class blog URL to our Join Us page!.

While in charge it’s hoped the class (or teacher) will write least one post a week that students from other classes and their class can choose to respond to by writing:

• a post on their own student or class blog
• and/or leaving a comment on this blog

Check out Jan Smith’s post on Making Change as an example of how you might do this!

It’s also hoped that teachers will encourage their students to respond to the posts and to comment on other students’ posts. Here is an example of how Paul Bogush let his students know about their weekly tasks during the Student Blogging competition.

Want Automatic Notifications?

There are two ways you can be notified when new information is posted on this site!

1. Email Notification

The first–and potentially easiest–is to sign up for email notification. If you look in the right sidebar you will see a box where you can enter your email address.

Simply enter your email address, enter the anti-spam word and then click on “Complete Subscription Request.” You’ll receive an email asking you to activate your subscription, click on the link to activate your email notification. Now you’ll receive an email notifying you when new posts are added to the site.

2. Subscribe by RSS

The better way if you want to follow a number of different sites is to subscribe in a Reader rather than be updated by email.

Most blogs and news sites now use RSS to notify readers of new content. Sites that do provide updates using RSS will have one or more of the icons you see on the right. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s simply a way for new information to come to you whenever it’s put online. You don’t need to worry about what it means–just learn how to use it.

If you already use a Reader (like Google Reader, Bloglines or NetVibes) either:

• Copy and paste the URL of this blog into your Reader
• Or in my right side menu and click on the link for Subscribe by Feed Reader.

Or, if you aren’t using a Feed Reader I suggest you try Google Reader (www.google.com/reader). Here is more information about how to set up Google Reader.