The Comment Challenge begins tomorrow!

A few exciting bits of news before we get on to the prizes and awards:

• The Comment Challenge is great for your classroom too! We have several classrooms signed up to participate with their students and there are already tons of ideas for classroom activities posted. Please feel free to add more!
• We have added a common tag (comment08) for the Comment Challenge so that all posts will be collected (via RSS) and shared on the Comment08 page of the wiki. Please use this tag when posting about the challenge so we can be sure to read and comment on your post!
• The RSS feed for the coComment group “Comment Challenge” is already working and posted on the Conversations page of the wiki! Please follow the steps to participate so that your comments show up on the RSS feed as well.
• We have lots of activities already listed for participants, please feel free to add more!

And now on to the prizes & awards:

First of all, it is important to note that these prizes are not intended to be a monetary incentive to participate in this challenge. We would hope that the prize for participation is becoming a better blog citizen.

During the 31 Days to a Better Blog (which this Challenge was modeled after) the prizes actually ended up going to students/schools (in that case, they went to the Mini-Legends). We are hoping that this group of participants will make the same decision to share the prizes with those that will value them most.

We are so pleased to announce the wonderful generosity of coComment and Edublogs who will provide the prizes:

• From coComment: US$100 to the winner in each of the four categories (fourth category to be decided – we need your input!)
• From Edublogs: US$50 in credits to the winner in each of the four categories

We hope that these prizes can provide teachers, classrooms, students and/or non-profits with the support they need to implement a quality blogging program.

In addition to these fabulous prizes, the wonderful Scott McLeod has also generously shared his fantastic Comment Award blog badge for all of the winners of this competition.

Please feel free to add your ideas and suggestions to the wiki, or let Sue, Silvia, Michele or me know! We kick start the Comment Challenge tomorrow (May 1st 2008)!

Tags: comment08, Sue Waters, Silvia Tolisano, The Comment Challenge, Michele Martin, Scott McLeod, commenting, comment, challenge, blog citizen, cocomment, edublogs