The Edublog Awards

Announcing the 2011 Winners – Congrats to All!

Sue Waters — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:17:13 +0000

We are proud to announce all of the winners of this year’s Edublog Awards!

Well done to all the winners, nominees, those that contributed nominations, voted, and participated!

Here’s a link to the recording of the live ceremony!

For the winners, we encourage you to show off your award with one of the badges below.

And the winners are…

Check out the embedded Gooogle Doc below or Download this PDF version

Don’t forget the badges!

Prizes, vote totals, and gearing up for the award ceremony

Ronnie Burt — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:13:16 +0000

With just six hours of voting left to go, we’ve had well over 30,000 votes so far!

Please don’t forget to join us tomorrow, December 14th at 7pm EST (see it in your timezone) for the live awards ceremony.

Use this link to login to Blackboard Collaborate – come a little early to start the conversation if you’d like!

What do winners get?

Most importantly, winners will receive the recognition of their peers and the education community. We’ll provide badges to the top 5 finalists and the winners of each category after the ceremony as well to display proudly on their blogs if they choose.

We will also provide the opportunity for each winner to set-up a free Edublogs Campus site for their school or organization to use for a year! This private blog network makes it easy to create and mange blogs for students and teachers – all at your own domain.

The top five finalists in each category will be given a free year’s subscription to Edublogs Pro – pretty sweet, huh?!

Last chance to vote and join us for the live awards ceremony!

Ronnie Burt — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:28:49 +0000

Just over 30 hours to go for voting in this year’s Edublog Awards!

With thousands of votes rolling in each day, who comes out on top is definitely still up for grabs!

Please make sure to join us on Wednesday/Thursday (see the time in your timezone here) for the live awards ceremony.

We will put a link to the Blackboard Collaborate room here on this site, on our Twitter feed, and Facebook fan page.

Winners will get a chance to give a short acceptance speech if they wish and we’ll hangout and celebrate once it is all over. This will be a great chance for you to interact with bloggers, educators, and community members – so don’t miss out! The group chat alone makes this a fun and worthwhile event!

Get your last minute votes in and hope to see you at the ceremony!

Check out the Complete 2011 Edublog Awards Nominations shortlist

Sue Waters — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:59:26 +0000

The most important part of the Awards process for us is creating a list of resources that will help educators!

This year we’re trying an alternative option for sharing the lists by embedding a Google Doc (or you can check it out as a web page here)!

We’re still working on the information about the hashtags and web tools. But it is quite time consuming. Please leave a comment if you have some information we can add! Once completed we’ll be converting it into a PDF.

Hope you like and it helps!

Just click on the category name at the bottom of the spreadsheet to check out all short listed nominations in that category.

The 2011 Edublog Awards – voting is now open

Sue Waters — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 02:28:14 +0000

The nominations are up and voting is now open in the 2011 Edublog Awards!

Voting is open until 11:59 PM US Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, December the 13th – and the winners will be announced at the Edublog Awards ceremony on the 14th at 7pm EST (more to come soon).

About the Nominations

Use the links in the sidebar or the “2011 Nominees!” link in the top menu to check out all of the shortlisted nominees.

Each year there are more and more nominations, and of increasing excellent quality, reflecting the ever growing edublogosphere — nice work guys!

Unfortunately we can’t list every single nomination in each category — that’s too overwhelming for everyone.

Instead, our intrepid team of judges combed through hundreds of nominated sites to whittle them down to a manageable number of shortlisted nominations for each category.

Apologies in advance if your site or nominated sites don’t make it – this was such a tough decision!

There are many factors that determine whether a nomination is shortlisted, and some categories were considerably more competitive than others due to the incredible number of nominations.

For example, sites weren’t shortlisted:

If they obviously didn’t fit the category (such as Nings or wikis being nominated in blog categories)
If they were self nominations
If they didn’t follow the nomination submission process

Other factors used for shortlisting included:

For blogs and influential posts – indicators of reader engagement (such as # of comments, bookmarking, pingbacks)
For Tweeters – conversation indicators (such as number of following/followers, lists been added to, types of conversations, whether account was public or private)

Due to the thousands of nominations received, there is most likely a typo or mistake or two. Let us know in the comments so we can fix it up!

Nomination Badges!

Yes! We have badges for everyone who has been shortlisted :)

If you’ve been nominated, grab your badge from the top of your category page and it place in your sidebar linking back to the poll, nominations will be listed on those pages forevermore so wear ‘em with pride.

There is also a generic “vote for me badge” at the top of this post!

How to Vote

We’ve changed how you vote this year! Now you can vote for your favorites all in the one location.

Just go to the Vote Here link in the top navigation or vote on each nomination page by choosing the category you want to vote in, then who you want to vote for! Easy! And best of all once you’ve vote it loads a page where you can share your vote on Twitter or Facebook!

Remember that only one vote per day per category will be counted from the same location!

This means, if your school uses one IP address, you’ll need to ask students and staff to vote from home, or only one vote will count :)

QUICK! Nominate Your Favorite Mobile App for Education

Ronnie Burt — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 05:49:08 +0000

Nominations for all categories are now closed.

BUT, in a new twist for the Eddies, we’ve decided to do a quick round of nominations for your favorite mobile app while we wait for voting to begin!

These can be for student use, learning, teacher productivity, or any app that makes your life as an educator better.

All you need to do is complete the quick form below and we’ll announce the nominees when voting opens for all of the other categories.

That should happen sometime on Sunday. Just as quickly as we can get it organized and ready to go :)

We decided to do this after having such positive feedback on the new “Free Web Tool” category this year. We most likely won’t have it organized in time for voting in a normal category – but this should make for a great resource list for others once compiled.

What do you think, shall we vote on this category too? Let us know in the comments below!

Sorry – Nominations for this are now closed!

Last Call! Nominations Will Close Friday – 11:59pm EST

Ronnie Burt — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 02:10:25 +0000

Just a quick note to say that nominations won’t be accepted after 11:59pm EST tomorrow (Friday the 2nd)!

Countdown Creator Progreat free widgetsWidgetboxMore info

Make sure to get any final nominations in before the countdown makes it to zero!

Just for a sneak peek, this is by far the most nominations submitted ever.

Sometime over the weekend we will announce the shotlisted nominees and open voting at that time.

One thing we’ve been noticing, which we are extremely excited about, is the natural progression of nominees rolling in that have a specific specialty or are from a particular area. For example, ESL educators nominating fellow ESL colleagues, or speech pathologists doing the same for those in their field. It hasn’t been as obvious in years past, which really goes to show that as a community of educators, we are really starting to build our PLNs around those that match closely to what we do. This is only possible because the sheer numbers of those blogging and interacting on twitter, for example, are growing exponentially.

How wonderful that we can now collaborate with and learn from others around the globe just as easy as we can with the teacher next door!

Get those nominations in and check back over the weekend to get your vote on!

Edublog Awards News: Keeping Up With All The Nominations

Ronnie Burt — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:25:35 +0000

Whew – we’ve processed over 400 nominations since launching with more rolling in each hour!

In case you are just tuning in – more on the nomination process and where to submit yours can be found here.

It’s fun to keep up with them as they come in, and once voting starts, we will publish them all here for you to enjoy.

For now, you can keep up with many of them with:

Twitter Search – The same used for the widget in our sidebar. You can get your own widget to embed on your blog here.

Google Blog Search – Updated with the latest blog posts that contain “Edublog Awards” somewhere in the content. An excellent way to find new blogs to follow!

Just a few thoughts – each year we come across a few posts from some that aren’t big fans of this process (see here for a recent example). We’ve also enjoyed reading posts such as Not My Edublog Awards Nominees - which puts an interesting perspective on wanting to give props to fellow PLN members, but perhaps not nominate for the awards. Please know that we welcome all feedback and are always working on ways to make this as valuable and useful process as possible to everyone. Just to throw this out there – our personal favorite part of the Edublog Awards isn’t that we crown a winner in each category, but that we:

Celebrate and recognize those that contribute to our personal learning
Create a handy list of incredible resources for the community to refer to
Build awareness of all of the excellent ways technology is being used in education

We can’t tell you how many times people ask us for good librarian blogs to follow, for example, and we point them to the list of the previous year’s nominees.

Keep the nominations coming – remember to get them in by Friday, December 2nd!

Nominations Open – The 2011 Edublog Awards are on!

Sue Waters — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:51:20 +0000

Here’s what you’ve all been waiting for!

The Edublogs Awards 2011 are a go!

The Edublog Awards is a community based incentive started in 2004 in response to community concerns relating to how schools, districts and educational institutions were blocking access of learner and teacher blog sites for educational purposes. The purpose of the Edublog awards is promote and demonstrate the educational values of these social media. The best aspects include that it creates a fabulous resource for educators to use for ideas on how social media is used in different contexts, with a range of different learners while creating an invaluable resource of the best-of-the-best on the web!

How To Nominate

To nominate your favorites, we’re following the same approach as the last three years, namely asking you to:

Write a post with your nominations for the different categories on your own blog (or a website – anywhere public)
Send us the link to your nomination post via the form at the bottom of the Nominations Page

And we’ve made some changes to categories this year such as:

Some categories have been combined together (Best ed tech / resource sharing blog and Best educational use of audio / video / visual /podcast)
We’ve created two new categories (Best open PD / unconference / webinar series and Best free web tool)
Virtual worlds are encouraged to be part of the expanded “social network” category

Here are the categories in full – nominations are open from now until Friday 2 December, and voting will then be up until Tuesday 13 December and the ceremony will be rocking on Wednesday 14 December!

So go nominate your favourite blogs, twitterers, community sites, videos, podcasts and more… for 2011:

Best individual blog
Best individual tweeter
Best group blog
Best new blog
Best class blog
Best student blog
Best ed tech / resource sharing blog
Most influential blog post
Best twitter hashtag
Best teacher blog
Best librarian / library blog
Best School Administrator blog
Best free web tool
Best educational use of audio / video / visual / podcast
Best educational wiki
Best open PD / unconference / webinar series
Best educational use of a social network
Lifetime achievement

How To Nominate

Write a post with your nominations on your blog, link to them and link to this site
Use the form at the bottom of the Nominations Page to send us a link to your nominations

(Yes, we put that in there twice just so it was uber clear!)

Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below :)

Announcing the 2010 Edublog Awards Winners!

Ronnie Burt — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 01:55:00 +0000

We are proud to announce all of the winners of this year’s Edublog Awards!

Well done to all the winners, nominees, those that contributed nominations, voted, and participated!

A link to the recoding of the live awards ceremony will be posted on this blog soon.

For the winners, we encourage you to show off your award with the badge below. Make sure to link the badge to the page with all of the results in your category, and here is a cheats method for uploading badges in both Edublogs and WordPress blogs.

And without further adieu, here are the top three finishers in each category this year!