Voting is open until 9AM Australian Eastern Standard Time on Sunday December 21st… and the awards ceremony will be held in Second life at 10AM (more on that to come soon).

Some important changes to the way we’re doing things this year are:

- One vote per IP per category (sorry, it’s the only way to avoid rigging, to a degree, your colleagues and students are just gonna have to go vote from home… or from their iphones ;)

- You can vote for multiple blogs / sites at the same time, so vote once, but vote broadly!

- Results will not be displayed at all (we’re keeping them *completely* secret until the awards ceremony)

- Also, you’ll notice there are more nominations this time… that reflects the ever growing edublogosphere and also the quality of the nominations, nice work guys!

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

And I’m absolutely sure there are a few typos, stuffed up links, etc. etc. :) So, let me know about them in the comments below and I’ll fix ‘em up in a jiffy.

So, what are you waiting for… go check out all those outstanding blogs, and vote for them!

I’ve been fortunate to work with charity Childnet International this year – one of the worlds leading e-safety organisations, whose mission is to work in partnership with others around the world to help make the internet a great and safe place for children. Childnet provide a wide range of high quality resources covering topics including blogging, mobile phones, data protection, file sharing, aimed at young people, parents, carers, and schools. Most recently I’ve been working with them on their Digizen site – an amazing media literacy project which covers cyberbullying issues, and advice on using social networking services in education.

Childnet have a long history of running internationally based young peoples competitions which focus on the responsible use of technologies, and in supporting young people to models great practice. The Edublog Awards are delighted to be promoting Childnet’s brand new Digizen competition and we hope that you will support it as well, by spreading the word and by encouraging your students to enter – or even supporting the production of entries in your school councils, or in your subject areas – citizenship, drama, English or IT for example.

The competition is open to young people between the ages of 14 and 19 who are in formal education, or who are being home schooled. There are main two criteria for entries:

1. Entries should address some aspect of cyberbullying.

This could be around a specific type of cyberbullying, or a particular debate or issue to do with cyberbullying. Any format or approach is allowed – it could be a videoed discussion, a comic about a students experience or views, a podcast of a radio show, reviews of resources. The entries should be targeted at their peers or at younger children. They don’t need to be huge, overly complex or ultra slick – they do need to be thoughtful, interesting and engaging. One example of a potential entry could be a short discussion of why mobile phones might be banned in response to cyberbullying incidence in school, and whether or not this is effective. A student could record this on their mobile and upload it to a video hosting site, inviting other students to leave their comments.

You can get more ideas about the range of issues cyberbullying touches on over at the Digizen site.

2. They must be online

Entries can be in the form of websites, blogs, social network site profiles or groups, and can be audio, visual or text based. Once entries have been posted online you can submit your students work here. Find out more information about the competition terms and conditions over at the Digizen site.

We’ll be updating on the competition at the awards in December (the Digizen competition doesn’t close for entries until January 31 2008) – and we hope to be able to highlight some of the examples of the entries to date.