TechQuest Project Evaluation

With the year winding down my TechQuest project will also be coming to an end soon. The kids in North Carolina take their version of the MEAP at the end of the year. In speaking with my colleague I know that she wants to end the blogging earlier than the school year ending so that she has time to work on her end of the year test.
I believe that this activity went really well for myself as well as my students. We were able to use the N.C. student's blog to evaluate their use of the writing process as well as learn new information from those students that we may not have had a chance to learn. For example, my students know now what the natural resources are in North Carolina.
Going into this project I thought that I would assign the blogging topics to my students, but as we were working on the blogs it seemed more natural for them to come up with topics themselves. They work collaboratively every Thursday morning and create a list of about 7 topics that they would like to blog about that day. They don't have to use everything from the list but I do want them to use the list as a guide.
I also started to, randomly, assign a topic that was mandatory. It's an easy assessment for them to accomplish within their blogs. If they don't remember the topic then they take out their books and they re-read on that topic. That has turned out to be a great research and learning opportunity for my students. As I reflect on my blogging experiment, I realized that there aren't many areas that I would change within my project. This is due to the fact that I changed them already while we were working on the project. One area that I would change is how I choose the students who get to blog. I don't like the idea that only one gets to blog at a time. I worry with the classes that will be coming into my room, would that choice work for the next class? I don't think that it will always work the way it did this year.
I think the most important lesson I learned in this experiment was to have the students as involved as possible. They get so excited about having ownership over their blogs. They like the fact that they get to pick their topics and it's never a fight to get them to challenge themselves in writing more paragraphs. I believe this is due to fact that they are involved in the topic process. It's also important for others to understand that my students got so excited when it was time to blog. They liked the process of it and they liked to be learners of the N.C. students and be teachers to them as well.
I will be putting blogging into my classroom for next year. I will be keeping in contact with my friend in North Carolina and I will be branching out and finding another teacher whom we can start another blog with. I am hoping to add a blog a year until I have about four blogs so that my students can be put into groups to blog. This is a little scary for me to think about and it's exciting at the same time. I really feel that my students improved their writing skills this year as well as learning how to add more detail into their writing. I hope that they can retain that information to help them on their 4th grade writing MEAP.