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Sunday, December 21, 2014

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.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

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!

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Connected Courses Blog Syndication

As part of participating in the Connected Courses cMOOC, my blog will be linked to the Connected Courses blog. Just having my blog listed in proximity of Howard Rheingold's blog definitely puts some pressure on keeping up with my blog on a regular basis. From being part of #BlogJune, I know that it is difficult to find the time to write a reflective post every day and have been trying to maintain writing at least one post a week as my goal.

I am looking forward to being part of Connected Courses though and learning from colleagues everywhere.

Funny how in the past, I would have been fortunate to share ideas with colleagues in my own school district on district professional development days that were scheduled only once per quarter during the school year, and now I can reach out to colleagues from across North America and from around the world by just turning my laptop or iPad on and writing a blog post or sending out a tweet on Twitter. It is truly amazing what a globally connected world we live in today!

Thursday, June 13, 2013

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.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Almost 1000 Hits!

Tonight I logged into Blogger to write a blog post in an renewed effort to keep up with blogging, especially since listing my blog on the ISTE Blog Registration. Amazingly, my blog has received 999 hits! Wow! So somebody out there is reading...

I'm not quite sure that I understand the ClustrMap though since it lists only 32 visitors since April 7. From the ClustrMap "notes" section, it seems that counts are only being added each time a unique computer IP address accesses the blog as opposed to Bloggers "Visits" widget which tallies every time the blog is accessed. This would imply that 32 people have visited my blog a total of 999 times all together, resulting in maybe 30 visits per person or a handful of
the 32 people accessing the blog many more times and others only a few times.

However, when I looked at the list of locations of the "Recent" visitors and the Current Country Totals, I realized that this thinking is flawed because last week I noticed that there were visitors listed on the location list from France, Germany, Norway, and Finland, and those do not appear on either list now. The ClustrMap widget is listed as updating every day, so I'm guessing then that the "Recent" location list is purged every 24 hours, but I'm not sure why the countries are not all represented on the Current Country Totals chart.

When I checked the Blogger Stats section, I noticed that the Pageviews chart does not equal up to 999.

I find these disparities in data between and within counters frustrating. I love data - really love it, seriously. But I want it to add up, to make sense, and without fully understanding the algorithm behind either counter, I am unsure how the data totals are derived and question whether or not they are accurate and why they do not list the same countries.

Hmm. And I was so excited when I first began this post! I think my takeaway is going to be that I have 999 hits (somehow) and I need to raise the bar for myself in terms of keeping up with posting and finishing all of the half-finished (or half-started if your glass is half-full) posts that are still sitting in the Blogger post queue as drafts.

I'm hoping someone reads this blog post in the morning, or overnight too I guess since a handful of European countries more than seven hours ahead of me on the international time line are listed as having readers who are checking my blog (Does that really make it overnight if it is really already tomorrow for them?), so that at least I can start my day off tomorrow morning with 1000 hits!

Friday, May 17, 2013

ISTE Blog Registration

It's official. I registered my blog on the ISTE blog registration!

Now I need to attempt to keep up with posting regularly, which hasn't been as easy as I originally thought it would be when I first started this blog.