Why do some of us blog with our students? I’ve tried to address this at some workshops at the last two CEGSA conferences, but thought another perspective would be interesting. Who better than Sue Wyatt, a teacher from Tasmania, who not only blogs with her students, but has initiated a global blogging challenge, ably assisted by Sue Waters? Although Sue is a very busy lady, she kindly agreed to respond to some questions to explain how & why she has such enthusiasm for blogging.

1. How long have you been blogging?
I began my own personal blog in January 2008, my classblog in February 2008 and an international student blog in January 2009 after running the first student blogging challenge.

2. What instigated you starting your own blog?
Truthfully, I can’t remember why I began blogging.  I think I was on a wiki that was written by Sue Waters and she had some pages about blogging.  From there it just leapt ahead in leaps and bounds.

3. What did you see as the main purpose of your class blog? Has that changed?
My classblog was for students to post about topics of interest to them.  I began by giving lessons on internet safety using the “Cyberquoll” website from the Australian Government, then asked students to submit posts via email that I could put on our blog.  At this stage students had no rights as users on the blog.  But the very keen students loved the chance of writing, so I began to create individual blogs for each student.  I trained the first 5 who then became the teachers when other students earned their blog.

So my classblog then became a sort of demonstration blog, showing the students what they could be doing on their own blogs. In this time we moved from “Learnerblogs” to Edublogs” as the platform for the blogs. I began putting lessons on the blog about finding creative commons images, how to upload your avatar and other widgets etc. But once the students were using their own blogs well, very little was needed on my classblog, so I decided the students needed to widen their audience of readers as the only people commenting on their blogs were myself and other students at school.

4. What gave you the idea of a blogging challenge?
I noticed that the only people commenting on the blogs of my students were myself and other students in our school.  That was not the reason why I wanted my students to be blogging – I wanted to open their eyes to the world outside of our school.  So how to do this?  Using the people in my PLN (personal learning network), especially Jan Smith from Canada, Paul Bogush from USA, Ines Pinto from Portugal and my best mentor Sue Waters from Western Australia and editor of “The Edublogger”, I asked them would they be interested in a blogging challenge where we linked the students of our classes together via our blogrolls so they could connect more easily. Sue then mentioned it via Twitter and soon more teachers were wanting to be involved.  By the time the first challenge began we had over 500 students participating either on their own blog or via a class blog and they represented nine countries of the world.

5. What are the benefits you see for students who blog and/or join the blogging challenge?
Many of the students taking part are middle school age 10-14 years old and the challenge is a safe way for them to start building a PLN of their own.  They find students with similar interests in many countries of the world. Some might get the chance to Skype into their friends classroom or even their home if the time zones are that different. Their writing skills improve tremendously, see these two posts from Abbey about her blogging journey. As a grade 6 student in 2008, now grade 7, Abbey has taken part in all three blogging challenges I have run and she can easily tell you the benefits of blogging.

Taking part in the blogging challenge is a safe way of connecting with other students around the world.  Students have to register giving their teacher’s name and URL of the blog.  That way I check them out to see that they are suitable for being in the blogging challenge.  I can email teachers if something is not right – an inappropriate comment etc but have only had to do this once.

The student and class URLs are then added to a page on my classblog to make it easy for them to communicate with each other. I also use RSS feed to my Google reader to create a link to all the posts that have been written by the participants in the challenge.  Again making it easy for classes and students to see what is being written about. This is also linked to a page on my classblog.

6. What advice would you give to teachers thinking of starting blogging with their students?
My one and only piece of advice is get in there and do it.  There are lots of people out there prepared to help you especially those of us who have been blogging for a while.  Sue Waters is fantastic to have as a mentor and will answer all questions about blogging however silly you think they might be.  But, be prepared for a steep learning curve.  It is better to begin your own personal blog, write about your experiences while learning to blog before starting with your students.  That way you have already learned some of the hard problems about setting up a blog, hopefully you have built a PLN of other bloggers with similar interests in blogging with students and you feel more comfortable using a blog. Read these posts about using blogs with students written in “The Edublogger”.  Here and here and here and here and here. Make sure you spend a few lessons teaching students about being internet savvy and the purpose of the blog otherwise it might just end up like students sending emails to each other.