Student Bloggers at Custer--Finally!

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of observing as a group of sixth graders, together with their teacher, problem-solved their way to creating their own blogs using Kidblog. The kids were entirely undaunted by initial challenges as they tried to get started. Although I have been blogging for a while, Kidblog was a new platform to me and has changed since I first experimented with it two years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed learning side-by-side with the students. At Family Reading Night at our school on Tuesday evening, the topic of blogging was buzzing among the kids. In less than two days, they mastered blogging tricks that took me weeks to figure out on my own. Their engagement during this process has been intense. The quality of their first posts was higher than I expected. As they continue to post and comment, it will be revealing to see how their writing and writing process changes. I'm itching to hear their reflections.

Getting Back in the Swing

Wow, how embarrassing. 

This post took months to write. I had countless drafts on paper, on my laptop, on my iPad--none felt right. This November, I wrote over 50,000 words during NaNoWriMo, but still no blog post. How silly is that? My most prevalent excuse was my transition from literacy coach back to school speech-language pathologist which was accompanied by much wailing and gnashing of teeth. As part of this process, I busily searched for other speech therapist bloggers, tweeters, and Pinterest pinners. I also lurked on the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) member forums. While reading an ASHA forum focused on school speech therapy issues, I finally got the guts to post on a thread about reading comprehension. I had no idea how other speech and language professionals would react to my literacy-coach-mixed-with-speech-therapy thinking. Thankfully, Mary Cummings, an ASHA certified SLP, responded to what I wrote in a way that didn't make me feel like an idiot. So thank you, Mary Cummings, for reminding me that writing is a risk worth taking, spelling errors and all.

Using Paper.li

Last week, I started experimenting with a web tool called Paper.li. I first heard about it when reading a post written by Stacey Shubitz, co-author of Two Writing Teachers. Paper.li collects a selection of tweets posted by you and your followers and organizes them into an appealing newspaper format. As the editor of my newspaper, which I named the School SLP & Literacy Daily, I can publish it as is or delete or add articles. I can also add web content I find using the Paper.li bookmarklet. I don't have total control of where those articles appear in my newspaper but I can move articles as a lead story and any web content I add myself appears on the front page. I can tweet my newspaper or embed a sidebar gadget into my blog that shows my latest edition.

Screenshot of one of my recent editions.

There is also an option to automatically tweet your newspaper, which I would probably never do. Everytime my daily edition becomes available for me to view, there are always irrelevant tweets, photos, or videos that I want removed. I can view all the tweets included in the edition and delete anything I don't like. In the free application, there is always advertising that I cannot control. If I wanted to spend $9.99 per month, I could control most aspects of the paper including advertising. Chances of that happening are slim. And the Paper.li iPhone app is pretty useless. It is easier to access your account through Safari if you are using your iPad.

One of the most interesting features which I haven't used yet is the option to add an editor's note. Not sure why I have been avoiding it. Maybe it is because I've never written an editorial and I'm not sure what I'm doing. I think as I further solidify in my mind the purpose of my newspaper and the audience I want to connect with, an editor's note will seem easier. Creating the newspaper and learning to use Paper.li has been an interesting process and well worth the effort. The more I use it, the more I see how teachers might use it with students. The writerly decisions involved in curating and publishing using Paper.li are authentic and would promote purposeful discussion about audience and purpose.

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Twitter: Let's Do Lunch!

As I mentioned last week, it took me six months to compose my first tweet after opening my Twitter account. Good grief. I never considered Twitter as a way to connect and collaborate until Stacey's TWT post about trying out Pinterest and Twitter last November. Getting started with Pinterest felt easier although it took some trial and error. It has proved to be an excellent way to begin to connect with other speech therapists. With my transition back to speech this fall, I hoped that Twitter might also be a useful way to expand my hunt for other speech therapists like me. One problem is that I'm still so drawn to all the literacy tweets that I forget that I'm supposed to be looking for speech stuff. But I will keep at it. Like Pinterest and blogging, Twitter will take time and starting slow works fine with me. And right now, I am so excited when I see that someone I know from the TWT community posts a tweet. It feels like looking across a noisy crowded cafeteria on the first day of school and seeing a familiar face and being so relieved that I will have someone to eat lunch with. So if you are thinking about diving into Twitter but you are afraid of eating alone, don't worry. I'll look for you, if you'll look for me. Maybe we can eat lunch together. Seriously, if you are interested in Twitter, read Stacey's previously mentioned post and her recent post on microblogging. Also, check out the excellent LiveBinder below curated by Steven Anderson. It's filled with resources to help get you started with Twitter.



An Educators Guide To Twitter

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Starting to Tweet

I created a Twitter account at least six months ago. I figured out how to re-tweet but felt paralyzed composing my own tweet. One of my goals this summer was to get comfortable with Twitter so today, I tried again. I tweeted about how much I like the Blogsy app, then about what I was reading, and then I replied to a tweet posted by ASHA (American Speech and Hearing Association) about the misconceptions that colleagues have about the roles of speech therapists. I still don't really get the whole hash tag thing but I am determined. I've promised myself I will keep at it. Check out this tweet and blog post from Franki Sibberson.

On the Blog: Digital Writing: The First Six Weeks of School bit.ly/QHxQrR#dublinleadership12
— Franki Sibberson (@frankisibberson) August 7, 2012

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More Healing, More Writing

I think my son is about to turn the corner in his healing process. The original golf ball size pilonidal cyst cavity (warning: pictures from Wikipedia link are not for the squeamish) has almost closed. It started at approximately 2.9 cm deep and has reduced in size to .7 cm deep. He also has a 9 cm incision running the length of his butt crack that once contained additional channels caused by the cyst. This area is also healing nicely. Right now I want this entire nightmare to be over. Daily packing of his wound and monitoring his medication, pain, and signs of infection have been all consuming. I seldom leave the house unless I'm getting groceries or medical supplies. I relinquished control of my lap top so my son would have something to do while on the couch or in bed.

Even though I haven't written any posts in several days, I have been writing, mostly journal entries and lists. I knew I would eventually write about this pilonidal cyst thing but I wasn't sure what that would look like. And since I primarily use my lap top to compose and post, not having easy access to it was a convenient excuse. I have used my iPad and the Blogsy app to post before but I was so slow at using the iPad's internal keyboard that it took forever and I became frustrated. I decided to spring for an Apple wireless keyboard with my birthday Amazon gift cards. The keyboard is super lightweight and portable. Directions for using it with an iPad are not included in the tiny instruction book but one two-minute YouTube video is all it took to get things up and running. It wasn't cheap, almost $70.00, but I absolutely love it and I'm now enjoying posting with my iPad.

My Apple wireless keyboard was so easy to set up and works like a charm.

 

 

 

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Keep on Writing

Big sigh. Participating in the TWT Slice of Life Challenge and NaNoWriMo showed me how to stick with it. These experiences taught me that sometimes writing feels hard. I realize this is a normal feeling but I'm still annoyed with myself. I have been writing so much in my head for days and days but unable to commit anything to paper. So today, I'm allowing myself to rip the Band-Aid off, lower my standards, and just get something down. I have been feeling a little paralyzed in general lately. To avoid actually writing anything, I managed to organize all of my professional books into one bookcase. One shelf for coaching and PD, one for reading, one for writing, and one for word study. And I created a new blog, One Speech Therapist, and I've spent far too much time Pinterest cruising. I have several writing projects staring at me. For example, I wanted to create some kind of eBook or photo book for my lit coach buddies using stories we wrote on napkins when we were together presenting in Corpus Christi several years ago. I got started then I got stuck and the half finished project is sitting on my office chair nestled between two other unfinished projects. I'm thinking I need to impose a deadline on myself. Or maybe I need to get myself going by finishing something smaller, like this post.

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Sticking with Blogger (for now)

With my recent move back to speech therapy I figured why not start a new blog to document this transition. I created One Speech Therapist as a companion blog to One Literacy Coach. Since I view blogs as ongoing pieces of writing, I needed to consider audience and purpose for the new blog. My purpose for blogging really hasn't changed in the last year and a half. I blog because I enjoy connecting with other educators, bloggers, and writers and sharing ideas. I'm not interested in selling anything or blogging for profit. The challenging part for me for this new blog is audience. Who do I want to connect with? Speech therapists have lots of different specialties and work in many different settings. And I'm not even sure who I am as a speech therapist anymore, although I'm working on it. I've been reading, reading, reading, articles and published handouts and PowerPoint's from recent conferences. I'm also reading professional books written by speech therapists with a deep understanding of literacy and the reciprocal nature of oral language, written language, and reading. So what does all this have to do with sticking with Blogger?

I considered using WordPress for my new blog. I read and reread blog post after blog post touting the benefits and disadvantages of a variety of web hosts, and I decided to stick with Blogger. I know I don't own my content but I'm okay with that. And WordPress isn't going to help me with my concerns about audience. Figuring out audience will take time and effort regardless of the blogging platform I choose to use. WordPress has wonderful features but  I'm not willing to invest the time yet to learn how to navigate it. Blogger is so easy to use and I haven't encountered significant reasons to switch. My biggest whine about Blogger used to be the lack of threaded comments and they added that feature a few months ago. I also enjoy using Blogsy to write and publish posts and it works like a charm in Blogger. Actually, I think Blogsy works great with WordPress and other web hosts as well. Blogsy is an awesome app by the way. So for now, I'm sticking with Blogger.

Blog Neglect

My blog is in major need of some spring cleaning. I tend to let it get so cluttered up, like my desk. But it is time. Time to revisit my purpose for this blog. What do I hope to accomplish, if anything? Many things to think about. I started thinking about overhauling my blog back in April when Stacey and Ruth unveiled the new fancy shmancy TWT layout, which I love. I experimented with a few templates but nothing felt right. What I should be doing is keeping a list of things I enjoy or appreciate about other blogs. Since the beginning, I wanted my blog to be an avenue for sharing and connecting with other educators and writers. I wanted to use the blog to sharpen and develop my writer's voice. Since those goals remain important, maybe I should just tweak rather than completely gutting it.

Blogging with My iPad

Blogging with my iPad . . . seems like a natural next step in my growing app addiction. This post was written and posted using an app called Blogsy. The app is fun to use and not difficult to figure out. Blogsy includes excellent tutorial videos. Embedding images from Picasa, Flicker, or your iPad camera roll is surprisingly easy. Maybe this will be the push I need to clean all my photos and images out of my hard drive and organize them in web albums in Picasa. Many fixes for Wordpress users were included in the most recent update. If you are interested in composing posts from your iPad, the $4.99 price is quite reasonable. So far, Blogsy is an app that actually does what it claims to do.

 

Getting the Resume Done

My digital resume is coming along. As usual, I had to take a straightforward task and turn it into a full-scale production. Examining my professional journey has been good for me. Like any other piece of writing, I tend to create and write a lot then go back and whittle away based on my audience and purpose. I chose to create a resume blog. It is basically a home page with a single post and tabs across the top. When readers select the Experience tab, they are lead to a page that links them to an interactive timeline I created in timeglider. I’m pleased with the results even though I’m not quite finished with it. When I zoomed out and looked at my timeline as a whole, I could see how much I have changed and grown along the way. I also included a tab titled, Personal Learning Network. When readers select this tab that can view a mind map I created in bubbl us. It shows how reading professional blogs and creating my own blog has transformed my professional development. I feel like I’m about half-way finished. My deadline is Sunday. No more excuses.

This is a draft of my mind map created in bubbl us. Pretty cool that
  you save your maps as jpg's and also print them out on a single page. 

On Becoming A Blogger

I've been thinking about how much I have changed as an educator in the last 13 months. Terje's post from Just for a Month about her online writing fears really hit home for me. I remember being scared to death to start a Google account so I could comment on blogs. It seems so silly now but it didn’t feel silly then. I still wish I could motivate just one of my co-professionals at school to leap into the blogosphere with me. So far, no luck. I completely get that blogging is a personal choice, not something I would try to coerce or guilt someone into. Still, I would like to encourage teachers to take this powerful leap. I tried to think back about what specifically prompted me to start blogging. For me, it was random. I found Two Writing Teachers by chance, just a few weeks prior to the 2011 SOL Challenge. Ruth’s words about starting a blog resonated with me and that was all it took. What pulled you to start blogging? Do teachers you work with blog also?

One Little Word Sunday: Thread

Last week, Amanda from In Search of Balance left a comment on one of my posts that included a quote from Peter Johnston. Below is part of her comment.

 On another note, I am reading Opening Minds by Peter H. Johnston, and this section made me think of you because of your OLW, “This set of interactions might not mean much by itself, but the threads it contains, repeated over and over in different forms, moment to moment, day to day, week to week, month to month, start to amount to something. Their power is strengthened as they echo and reverberate in the children’s talk […],” (p. 4).

First of all, I loved Choice Words and I am itching to get my hands on Opening Minds. Second, Amanda reminded me that I haven’t devoted much time lately to thinking and writing about my One Little Word, which is thread. I read her comment containing Johnston’s quote over and over. I kept thinking about how cool it was that she remembered my OLW and probably knew how much I would want to gobble up her comment and think about it. These connections, these threads that stitch the SOL community together may not be of the face-to-face kind, but they are no less authentic.  

Techie Dork

One of my goals this year was to dive into web 2.0 tools and begin to deal with my techie fears. The seeds of that goal were planted in March 2011. I am certain that starting my blog for the purpose of participating in the TWT challenge last year helped to grow my confidence and open my thinking to the instructional possibilities of all kinds of tech tools. But when I started my blog, I had so many questions. The vocabulary that surrounded blogging was a whole new world for me. I was forever googling stuff like, “What does RSS mean?” I still don’t completely get what a feed is. I would go to the Blogger help page and I felt like the answers to questions were written in a foreign language. I looked at the blogs of others and wondered where they got that thingy in their sidebar. I didn't even know what a sidebar was. I was very intimidated as a new blogger. But I quickly learned how patient and generous the folks out in the blogosphere were. People liked to share. My point is that if you are feeling like a techie or blogging dork, don’t worry. You are not alone.

One Little Word Wednesday: Thread

I had been hemming and hawing over today’s post. Thread. I almost started writing a post about how I didn’t know what to write about. I avoided writing my post by writing some comments on other blogs. I then returned to my Tuesday post on Web 2.0 Tools and started replying to commenters. Then it came to me. Threaded comments! Blogger recently implemented a threaded commenting system. Personally, I’m thrilled. Ever since I started my blog, I’ve considered adding Discus or a Reply button. I even considered switching to Wordpress because I liked their commenting system better than Blogger’s. But I didn’t. I actually didn’t even know that Blogger had rolled out the system until I read someone else’s blog. I assumed that bloggers using Blogger would be as pleased as I was. Not true. I was very surprised to read how many people hated the new system and wanted Blogger to switch back, or at least give them the option of disabling the system on their own blog. When I read the comments in Blogger Buzz, I could see why some people would be annoyed, even upset by these changes. For me, I’m looking forward to using the system to see if it promotes more conversations. 

Neon Spools

Roxy Gives Great Advice!

Roxy is my early morning writing
buddy. Now she has a voice! Check
out my Voki and hear what Roxy has
 to say about starting a blog. Way
too fun!

         

One Little Word Wednesday: Thread

This is actually a photo of my thread drawer
after editing it in Picnik. 

I was supposed to get myself to bed early on Tuesday evening. Didn’t happen. The phone bill arrived in the mail. My son was significantly over on his minutes which necessitated a discussion. My daughter was considering studying abroad next year. More discussion. The Iowa Caucuses were yesterday evening. Lots more discussion between me and my husband. I had planned to spend a quiet evening reading blogs, writing comments, and composing a post for today that had something to do with thread, which is my one little word.  My brain was fried from all the talk. As I wrote, I began to think about the nature of oral discussion and how different it is from texts, tweets, emails, or writing comments on a blog. 

Comments on blogs, even when threaded (ahhhh, there is the link to thread) feel very different than verbal conversations. Talking with living breathing people can be tiring. Then again, maybe it was the topics and who I was talking with that drained my desire to write or do anything else on Tuesday. While trying to compose this post I was interrupted by both of my teenagers several times. I guess I should have been glad they wanted to talk to me at all. Then my husband decided I should watch him watch the TV then pouted when I didn't drop everything for this obviously thrilling activity. By the end of the evening my energy was thread thin.

Playing with Google Docs

This is a reflective time of year. I like feeling that I have a fresh slate, a new start. Traditionally, I make lists of goals according to categories like Family, Work, Health, and Faith. I write goals because whenever I do, I tend to accomplish more than when I don’t. This year, inspired by Ruth’s post about Infographics, I’ve decided to take a different approach. I wanted to create a visual map of my goals. I used Google Docs, which is also one of my objectives for the coming year. One of the many cool things about Google Docs is that every document has its own URL, just like a blog post, and you can easily link other documents, images, posts, and sites to each other within a document, spreadsheet, table, or drawing. After I created my drawing, I linked a separate objective list to my big ideas: Make Space, Trust, Listen, and Take Action. Drawings can also be saved as JPG’s. Going through this process has pushed me to learn more about Google Docs and play with ways to use this powerful tool. My mind is already twirling thinking about creating curriculum documents that could be linked to one another. I just love this kind of stuff. I need a longer vacation. 

Very Pinterest-ing

Not long after Stacey posted about Pinterest, a friend of mine on Facebook sent me an invitation to join. I accepted the invitation and started an account. At first, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing or why. After playing with the social networking site for a couple of weeks, I’m now hooked. For me, Pinterest is all about the power of images and the ideas they conjure up. After choosing thread as my one little word, I created a board with pictures of thread and quotes about thread. The pin boards function like idea files using images. Be warned. Pinterest can be addicting! 

Blog Envy

Lately, Roxy seems to find my
pencils more interesting than my
blog.

Every month or so, I feel like I want to revise my blog. To me, my blog is an ongoing piece of writing. The purpose of my blog, as a piece of writing, remains the same: I want to take risks with my writing and connect with other teachers. I’ve considered starting a second blog as a container for SOL’s and using One Literacy Coach as more of a place for teaching ideas and lessons. I have some dummy blogs I started but then I get overwhelmed and just end up changing some things around on the old blog and calling it good. I guess maybe I am struggling with audience. Blogging is about comments and page views. Knowing who is reading your posts and whether they comment or not is interesting. Blogger has great stats and I’ve never had spam comments or unwanted advertisements pop up on my blog. But ever since I started my blog, I have been frustrated with Blogger’s commenting system. I like threaded commenting systems, such as Discus, but I’ve been wary of using them. I’ve read post after post on other blogs touting the pros and cons. I’ve considered switching to Wordpress but I am not convinced it is worth it. And then I think sometimes, maybe Blogger’s bulky commenting system is a positive thing. Commenting takes effort. And that is good, especially when you want to be part of a community.