Thing 1: Blogging

I am joining the Cool Tools for School activity - a little late - and am excited to learn about new resources to use in the classroom and in school media centers and libraries. I am currently working at Capital Region BOCES in the School Library Services Department. As part of my job, I work with librarians and staff of the school libraries we service.

As I go through each "thing" or module of this project, I will write a blog post about my experience and what I have learned. Regarding blogging, I have played a bit with blogs in the past, but never was very good about keeping it up-to-date. I have never used one in a professional capacity but can see the many possibilities they might have, particularly in encouraging discussion among students. It also takes away some of the doldrums from writing for those who are reluctant to do so and allows students more freedom over what they write and the format in which they are writing. The linked blog posts by Paul Wagner highlight the many benefits to using blogs in the classroom; I appreciate that he also emphasizes the need for internet safety and stresses teaching students how to blog safely and productively.

I've chosen to use blogger for this blog because it has a clear, easy-to-use interface yet is still fairly customizable. Because I already have a Google account, logging in and getting started with this blog was really simple.