B4B Week Three Summary

Have I met the benchmarks for week three of Blogging for Beginners?

• Blogging: I've posted entries on Bilingual Babble, One Teacher's Journey, and Puppets in Action (Thanks, Monika, for inviting me to participate in your collaborative blog about puppets!). In the posts, I've tried to experiment a little with html tags, but nothing major. I've edited my profile to include a picture and have even been able to guide a few people through this process as well. In the coming weeks, I'd like to try out more html and play around with fonts, colors, etc.


• Comments: I've visited and commented on many of the blogs created for this session. I'm really amazed at the variety of topics covered and purposes for these blogs! And, some blogs include audio and video, so I'm eager to learn more about how to do these things too.


• Contribute to the group blog: I left a comment on blogging safely and the advantages of RSS in the classroom. Although I haven't blogged with students yet, I think that these are two areas that are really important to think about before starting, so I'm glad to have had this opportunity. At present, I think that opening up a blog written by adult students to the public has more advantages than disadvantages; sharing can be really motivating and rewarding in a number of ways. Then, as the article points out, using RSS has numerous advantages for both students and teachers. One thing I still need to do is explore Bloglines, Netvibes, and others more.


• Feedblitz session: Although I wasn't able to attend the live session with Phil Hollows from Feedblitz, I checked out his PowerPoint presentation and subscribed to the B4B blog with this service. When I received an e-mail from Feedblitz about a new post to the B4B blog, I was really impressed with the layout and both the text and images from the post were included.

I'm looking forward to week four where we'll learn more about blogging pedagogy!