The world of blogging and making my thoughts and learning experiences public begins! As you can see from my profile, I am a teacher and now I'm a student once again. I have set up this blog for my first course with the University of Alberta's online distance education program in Teacher-Librarianship, specifically for my EDES 501 course learning about Web 2.0 tools.
In all honesty, this is not my first foray into the world of blogging as I used a blog for the first time last year as my grade 5 classroom newsletter. As Will Richardson advised in his book, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms", it's an excellent way to get your feet wet and get comfortable writing in a new format. Not surprisingly, it was a huge hit with my students' parents. My one hitch remained that many parents did not check the blog regularly and I was updating it weekly (a lot of work!). So I investigated further and found out about Google group e-mailing and set up an account for my parents and added them as members (with their permission) so that they would receive an update in their e-mail every time I entered a new post! I had unknowingly begun my "paperless" journey into the world of Web 2.0.
I guess I should mention that I was using Blogger.com as I was referred to it by a fellow staff member at our school. Now that I have begun this course, I also wanted to investigate other blog host possibilities but fell into a comfort zone once again with Blogger (after much reading and playing). However, I really enjoyed http://edublogs.org/as I found myself clicking on all kinds of links and learning something new at every click. Sue Waters (the Edublogger) shares so many different views and ideas on using Web 2.0 tools, specifically blogs in the classroom. I finally had to log off after "information overload".
Since I first started last fall with Blogger, they have made some changes to their formatting and added some new gadgets (although many come with unwanted Ads...blogger beware!)
As you probably noticed, I also had fun playing with my discovery of "wordle.net" while applying my header. It was a tricky job trying to get it to paste into the header but I learned a lot in the process. As my header words indicate, I am eager 2 learn and as the vocabulary shows, there is a lot out there to explore!
I've already started thinking about how this can work in the classroom (or my future school library!). I'm a huge fan of Literature Circles and Book Clubs and would love to start there with my students posting their responses and opinions. I know that in all subject areas the possibilities are endless. I'm anxious to hear how my fellow adult learners see blogs working in their different situations.
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