Blog Love or Neglect?

I was re-evaluating my performance as a Connected Educator today and decided I need to refocus some of my effort on keeping up with my own blog and reflecting on my practices as a digital leader and technology integrationist.

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Lately I have found myself sharing ideas via Voxer and Twitter much more than through this blog. I was prompted to compare my blog, Twitter, and Voxer by John Spencer's blog post Five Reasons The Conversations Have Moved From Twitter To Voxer.

I think the purpose of why I use each is very different. For me, Voxer is more of a tool for a conversational dialogue with a small group of educators from Minnesota, Iowa, and Canada where we share the educational endeavors that we're currently engaged with in our respective positions. Twitter is much more of a consumption-based tool for me as I connect with and learn from a broader group of colleagues, friends, educators, and like-minded individuals who represent a variety of careers and interests as well as geographic locations. Blogger is my content sharing tool of choice as well as a forum for reflective thought around improving my own practice as well as sharing resources with others.

As a Connected Educator, I don't think that one tool is better than the others as they are all different and allow me to connect with and reach different groups and audiences for different purposes.

So while I may have been sharing and connecting more via Twitter and Voxer lately, Blogger is still a critical tool for me as it allows me to tie together not only my thinking but resources that I would like to share with others.

Teach100 Blog

Today I received the Twitter notification that my blog is now a Teach100 Blog.

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I'm hoping that this will not only help me to build my network connections with other educators but that it will also help motivate me to build in time on a regular weekly basis to keep up with reflections and sharing information on my blog. My efforts to keep up a daily blog entry as part of #BlogJune were challenging and my goal of blogging once a week since then has also been a goal that has been difficult to meet on a regular basis.

I think that being a connected educator prompts us all to push ourselves to find time to share resources, ideas, and questions and to be more reflective ourselves, which results in self-improvement.

In honor of Connected Educator month, I'm renewing my goal to blog on a weekly basis every weekend. Let's see how I do in terms of keeping up!

Google Translate Makes Blog Content Language-Friendly

Have you ever wanted to be fluent in a foreign language?  Well now you can be!

Not by spending  hours listening to self-paced Rosetta Stone language lessons or by living in a foreign country with a host family.  Thanks to a Google widget you can install in your blog layout, you can instantly become fluent in multiple foreign languages with the click of a simple drop-down menu widget that makes it quick and simple to translate the text content of your blog post on Google Blogger to another language.

You can quickly revert to the original language of your blog, especially if you're not as fluent as you used to be in the translated language and don't quite remember the original content of your blog, by simply clicking the X at the top right corner of your blog.

Imagine having a collaborating classroom partner in another country with students who speak an entirely different language than your own students do.  Now your students can easily use Google Blogger to create a blog of classroom writing and connections that can become instantly multi-lingual with a click of the Google Translate button, making the experience much more personalized for the collaborating classroom students while enabling global connections.