The Adventure Begins....

.... at warp speed! I feel lucky to have already been familiar with Facebook as a Social Media platform but I am now tweeting and blogging and working on nings. Who had heard of a Ning before this year?

I'm diving head first into university, after a long hiatus, into this brilliantly engaging world of Web 2.0. I've always been a bit of a techno-lover but somewhere in the past few years I see I've been like an ostrich with my head in the ground. As far as educational uses for the web, I've been naive and dismally narrow as the cyber world has blasted off. What makes this course exciting for me is how practical the learning is, for my own use and directly for the students in my school. The opportunity to grow with other colleagues and to work collaboratively is unique, given that Teacher Librarians exist independently in schools but model and strive for continual professional collaboration.

Two years ago, with the initial help of my son, I set up a web page for another adventure. Paul, bless his heart, thought I should have a blog, but that so confused my mindset that I rejected the idea. Two years later, I wish he'd been more persuasive. Using Dreamweaver and keeping abreast of the web site was a challenge!

This fall, I started a blog for my school library on Wordpress, (as this was the platform Paul had originally led me to). I initially had some difficulties with it; eventually resolved. Then I started another blog on Weebly this week. Wow, I will be familiar with three platforms! As you can see I'm using blogger now.

Weebly feels more like a bridge between website and blog. Unlike Blogger, which does not allow extra pages, and Wordpress, which allows extra pages but no commenting on them, Weebly allows one to have pages or blogs, and as many as you want. You can have a blog as a sub page of a page, several blogs, several different pages. I will continue using both Weebly and Blogger this winter to investigate how I would use them with students. Check out the link to Lynnwood Library and see how I've developed blog pages for my two book clubs and link pages as well as a very easy-to-add contact page. I like Weebly's ability to merge blogs and pages.

I'm still figuring out RSS feeds and Google Friends and how to best use Google Reader. I bought an iPhone (because I thought I could finally justify it to myself!... self gratification sure works!).

Having had a profile on the web for a while, it was VERY interesting to see how my web identity had grown. It is a bit scary how much information is out there. Thank you to a 501 classmate who pointed out the various sites to check your onlne identity. Between the 3 sites, I found out my phone, my address, old deleted pictures... I'm very glad that I have (almost) always been very careful not to post anything very stupid on the web, Facebook, etc. We need to protect our personal identities.

Thanks for listening and reading my first course blog! I'm so looking forward to sharing in the next few months.