Thing # 11

I tried Google blog search first because, well, I like themes! Seriously! When I try to plan anything, I have to start with a theme and try to make it different somehow. Like when my daughter graduated from high school instead of the typical choice of school colors or graduation hats and diplomas, we had a party flavored with Central American food and decor since she was leaving on a mission trip to Honduras shortly after graduation. But, I digress! Since I have a Google reader thought I would start there. I typed in and searched "school library learning 2.0" first and right away a link for the School Library Learning 2.0 blog came up and when I went there, 23 Things were posted! On the right hand side, there was a blogroll. Reading the blogs and responses to the 23 Things was quite interesting.

From there I went to Edublog's award winners and looked for something interesting to pop out at me. I found a blog called The Journey. Since "journey" is my one word for this year (that will be explained in a later blog!), and I love the word, I went there. The blog had moved to a new site and the author shared that she was moving physically and digitally and wanted to simplify her blog. Her word- simplicity. While reading her post from December, I noticed that she had responded to the comments left on her blog and which I may not have been as aware of if I had not learned about the art of commenting in Thing #4. I added the blog to my RSS feed.

I thought Blog Search and Technorati both worked well and were fairly easy to use. My problem became subscribing to more than I can probably keep up with, but were so interesting! I remembered the Circle of the Wise and made sure to actually read the blogs to see what their teaching styles may have been and read their profiles as well. I will start here and see what happens. Besides The Journey blog (renamed http://collablogatorium.blogspot.com/2009/01/7-things-meme.html), I subscribed to The Spelling Blog (http://thespellingblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/english-spelling-quiz.html) where I took a quiz (and failed miserably!) on understanding the English language. I thought Jenna would love this site!

I did not like Syndic8.com. I thought it was confusing and not as easy to use as the other two. I feel the education blogs will be interesting to read for now. As I get closer to a classroom of my own, I may be more specific in what I focus on when choosing a blog to read. I found that once I started reading a blog, if I was kept interested, I would go see who read their blog and choose on of those to read. RSS really makes it simple to keep track! And simple in this case is good!