Thursday, 21 June 2007

Blogging fun?

I wonder if anyone else has ever got so jumbled in the themes and custom headers and the general appearance of the blog that there seems to be no end?? I keep changing mine - almost daily. I have even started 4 different blogs with different servers just to see what’s on offer. Crazy - I spend night after night trying to find the look I could finally settle with. No doubt this one will be changed again tomorrow! I found hundreds of wonderful new themes on a website, but unfortunately I don’t know how to download them. I really feel stupid and incompetent.
Then luckily, just googling ‘blogging advice’ I found a couple of sites with comforting ideas. Among others this from ‘How to blog by Tony Pierce’:
don't worry very much about the design of your blog. image is a fakeout.

So I had better get more into the content of my blog, hadn’t I? Why am I blogging anyway? I can think of 3 clear reasons that made me try this out:
1) I want to learn to use blogs myself before I even dream of introducing them to my students in class.
2) I want to at least appear to be a life-long learner and a qualified teacher even in the 21st century.
3) I would love to share and learn from others, and benefit from the collective intelligence of educators around the world.

But what exactly will my net presence consist of? What should I write about. This is what I read in Sherry’s blog:


Be honest. Write about your life. What you see, what you think, how you feel.

That sounds good to me. And wow, I have actually used some hyperlinks now! According to Vicki Davis (who writes The Cool Cat Teacher Blog with a million and one tips and pieces of advice to us uninitiated beginners, and is an amazingly prolific blogger for a teacher mother of 3, BTW!) in her post ‘Ten habits of bloggers that win’, one of the sure signs of an inexperienced blogger is long paragraphs of text without even one hyperlink. Not that I am aiming at winning anything with my blog, but I suppose I should learn the basic netiquette for blogs (would this be called ‘blogiquette’, perhaps??).

Yet another article I came by today, aptly called ‘The Loneliness of the New Blogger’ tells me this:


Read at least twenty times as much as you write. E-socialize.


I think I will carry on reading and surfing now. The Finnish summer nights are so long at this time of the year - Midsummer’s Eve with all the traditional celebrations in the countryside tomorrow.

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