Dream come true for an internet lover!

I made the mistake tonight of setting up my reading area right next to my twenty inch computer monitor. It certainly made it difficult to concentrate! The whole time, all I wanted to do was go on the internet to check my twitter, read some blogs, explore these webquests, google stuff, find an excuse to make a glog/figure out what that was, maybe check facebook, youtube a favourite song and read some articles about how teachers were using tech. Really anything online seemed much more appealing than what I was doing! And this is not because I don’t like reading or what I was reading, I just really, really like using the computer and the internet. This is not new for me, I have always loved the internet and I have always been a fairly early adapter to new tech tools. I mostly like free things and things that help me explore the internet but I never really focused my joy of all thing web on anything specific An example of my often misdirected addiction, I had one follower on twitter for an entire year and I still used it. ONE! (that really makes it quite pointless and I don’t recommend it by the way) but I was determined to figure out what all the (nerdy) fuss was about. Eventually it caught on and here we are, using it to become better educators. That makes me really happy. But I often thought of my love for the internet as just a hobby and in my younger years was more or less discouraged in my house, especially during the dark, dark days of dial up because it tied up the phone lines (not to mention was incredibly slow). I liked the internet and I have always seen its incredible potential as a personal tool but I didn’t really expand that to think about how I really use it. I actually have taken some technology and education courses in the past but it still seemed really far off to use these technologies in the classroom, but now I see people are using tech tools in their classrooms! It is happening, people. And the best part is I can even see me using them! I loving having a reason to obsess over and check out online tools. Tech tools will help me be a better teacher and they can help your students learn more effectively. Oh, and they are fun :) It can be overwhelming because there is a lot out there, and I can tell that some of my fellow classmates feel like they might have already had too much. The thing is we are getting a lot of information right now and it is an opportunity for incredible growth and experimentation but when it comes done to it, we are the ones planning our lessons and it is up to us to decide what we like and what works for us. My challenge will be using these things in front of a classroom and stepping out of my comfort zone. It will be difficult teaching with a technology that you haven’t really seen modeled very much but I am hoping that we can find a balance between trying new things and doing that which is natural to us.

Test! Test! Test!

I am doing this for school. Learning how to imbed slide shows from Sliderocket.com

Blog Design

I have had a few questions about how to change your blog template to something different than the ones provided in Blogger.

I would like to provide you with a full tutorial but I am still very new to this and I would be afraid that I would be misleading. What I will do is offer a few links to sites that I found offering free templates for your blog.

For this template, I used eblogtemplates.com. The site offers free blog templates for Blogger and WordPress. Make sure that you read the comments before you download. If people are having a lot of unresolved problems then you might wish to choose another one. Often though, users or the site manager will leave comments that will help you fix any issues that you are having when changing your template.

http://www.bloggerthemes.net/ has some nice ones but I didn't actually use this one yet. I did read a few of the comments and users were being directed to read the txt document that comes along with the download. Many designers create these to help users install their templates.

I love the designs featured on Smitten Blog Designs. I haven't tried any of them out yet but you will notice on the side that they have easy instructions for use.

It took me a long time to get my blog fully functioning, but it was pretty easy once I read the comments and made minor changes to the html. Looking now at other sites, I may have picked a more confusing one. Some of them come naturally without ads but I had to remove mine on my own.

Look around, have fun and be patient!
Please let me know how it goes or if you find any good resources on template designs.

On blogs and learning to accept the "imperfect"

Although this is my second blog, I am still very new to blogging. Upon creating this blog, my first blog was only a few weeks old and I still was unsure about many aspects. I easily created the account and set up the blog but I had difficulty understanding the customization features and how to create a blog that I felt represented what I wanted to say. This frustrated me and is what has held me back in the past. I was nervous about creating a blog that didn't look, function and read exactly the way that I wanted it to. In short, I wanted the "perfect" blog or nothing at all.

But starting the Tech Ed. course helped me push past that because whether my blog was perfect or not, I am expected to have one. And that both excited and terrified me. So I have been doing some exploring and learning. Tonight, I learned how to download a template from a free site and upload it to my blog, I learned how to edit the HTML to take out the ad boxes that came with the template and I learned how to change my URL and blog name. And as I did it , I thought "I should blog about this!" which isn't yet a natural thought for me.

But what I am learning is that creating a blog that is "perfect" isn't really possible. It is a learning process like anything else and  the more time we spend at it, the better our blogs will be and they will start to represent what we want them to. People aren't born bloggers just like they aren't born readers, writers, mathematicians or scientists! That will be our job as teachers, to help students learn these skills.

So as we start off this year, I am looking forward to learning how we can help our students, through technology and other means to be successful learners just as I am learning how to be a successful teacher (and blogger!)