Why I blog…
I started blogging about five years ago. My goal at the time was to let the staff and faculty in my school know more about technology resources that were available to them at the school. I largely focused on the tools that were already at their disposal. I also focused on establishing a relationship with my co-workers to let them know I was knowledgeable and could help them solve a problem or learn something new. At the time I was 22 and fresh out of Iowa State with a teaching degree. So largely, I started to share what I knew with others. I had a unique knowledge at the time in my district and they seemed to go over relatively well with the faculty and staff.
Over the next few years I began changing how I blog to become more of an advocate for technology and education. I began my M.Ed. program at Iowa State (via online distance ed) and over the course of that program I began to see the need to have a voice on the side of responsible technology integration. This has been something that I feel hasn’t been represented, or at least not to the same extent that other areas of curriculum and instruction have been in the past. So at some point over the last couple years I changed my focus.
In the last six months, however, I channelled my effort to a slightly different purpose. This time instead of focusing on helping just other people, I decided to focus on my own learning and use my blog as the platform for me to reflect on education, technology and my practice. This seemed to be the missing element in my blog, because updating my blog wasn’t an enjoyable activity for me. It felt like work! So after this past summer (2010), with a little help of a certain educational leadership course where I learned about professional learning, I decided I needed to take my blog and make it something where I could continually learn. A place where I could talk about things I don’t necessarily have a firm opinion or knowledge-base. Ever since, I have enjoyed updating my blog, because while I keep my readers in mind when I post an update, I’m really blogging for me.
The Topics…
The topics for my blog come from a variety of places. Where many come are from other blogs and educators. Part of my PLN is my blog, but the other part are reading other blogs and communicating with others through Twitter. Using my PLN I try to keep the conversation going on my blog as I try to add my own special flair. Sometimes I go into depth and sometimes not. I also get a lot of my topics from my position at UNI. I am a technology specialist working on a Teacher Quality Partnership grant. Our grant is charged with defining effective teaching and integrating it into rural pilot schools across Iowa, with the end game of diffusion in all Iowa PK-12 schools. In the conversations I have with members of the grant team, I find topics that need discussing and take that conversation to others across the state and world. Finally, a great number of my topics come from random thoughts or feelings I have throughout the day. If I am in a bit of a foul mood about something or I think of something inspiring, I try to reflect on it in as gracious and productive way as possible on my blog.
History of Technology Tips…
Technology Tips actually started as Tech Tips of the Week and wasn’t really a blog, but rather an email newsletter I would email out weekly to the staff and faculty at my first job in Cherokee, IA, in 2006. Let’s just say it was blogish. After a few months I realized there was no good way to archive my messages so I moved to a blog created using iWeb and posting the blog on the school’s Web server. As I moved through the next school year, I used the school’s Web server to host my blog, but it was a little slow to update and I couldn’t really do it from home, so I next looked to online options. However, I didn’t really see anything that I wanted and my tech tip of the week went by the wayside for most of the next school year. Then something big happened in the district. We switched to Google Apps and I had a great tool to use to update my blog, Google Sites. At this point my blog turned into more of a Web page rather than a blog since no one could really comment. This worked well for a while but I felt like I was missing part of the conversation so I switched yet again. This time I switched to a blogging platform that has served all my purposes quite well, WordPress.
