I am a Blogger Baby!!

I am a blogger baby! I say that with a West-Indian Brooklyn accent full of pride and pleasure! When first I created this blog back in June, I did not realize how much I would come to own it and value it as my sounding board and as a learning tool. I like this blog and I gladly show it off to family and friends. My blog gave me a whole new venue for voicing my opinion and I could see why so many people embrace that aspect of it.

But for the purposes of this class, my blog and my classmates’ blogs were great learning tools. I would never have guessed that tuning in to Melody’s, Lena’s and Janine’s blogs would have given me so much in a clearly less formal educational setting. If I had to read and research those technologies on my own, I am sure it would have been more tedious, but reading their blogs somehow made the information more accessible and friendlier. I also did not realize that in trying to find enough information to post for them, I was not only learning about the information technologies that I was assigned but I was doing so without the stress factor. Putting the information on my blog versus writing a paper was much easier. I will definitely embrace this Web 2.0 genre in my teaching. Imagine having students learn from each other this way in my high school. I can see the possibilities!

This fall, I plan to set up a blog for my library as a way of keeping teachers and students aware of resources and activities available to them, and I hope to set up a blogspehere in Paul Robeson High School. I would love to get everyone hooked onto blogging. I definitely see myself keeping a personal blog when this program is over. I have never embraced sites like MySpace or Friendster, but I really like blogging; maybe that is because I feel that I do not have to conform to the norms of those social networking sites—the pictures, the cool phrases, the conversations etc. In fact, what I really like about blogging is the freedom it gives me to speak on any issue I choose without seeming “uncool.” I was never cool anyway, and I with my blog, I don’t ever have to be. That’s liberating! I read my blog and I hear my voice, and I like that.