In November 2011 I undertook a short course for my NSW Teachers’ Institute accreditation process. It was called Authentic Learning and run by Jen Starink and Damien Feneley. One of the things that really sparked my interest was the technology that we were introduced to. A few years prior to this I had met another teacher at a history course. He told me about a collaborative site called Edmodo. I have found many great resources and teaching ideas on this this site, kindly supplied by other teachers from all around the world. Amongst the resources have been amazing web 2.0 technologies. There are in fact 2 teacher librarian groups on Edmodo of which I am a member – an Australian one and a US one (should you wish to join either of these groups please let me know and I will give you the joining codes). Collaboration is key in any profession and Edmodo is an amazing collaborative tool.
In any case, these two places have been key in getting me interested in the use of various technologies in the classroom and for personal use. A number of the Edmodo teachers use blogs and I have read their posts on occasion. However, I have shied away from blogs until now. Having no choice but to use a blog for ITL 401 I embarked on the journey of setting up a blog.
I started by discounting the one choice given to us that I hadn’t heard of before. That left me with Edublogs and WordPress. I had heard of these through Edmodo and therefore posted a question up there about what people thought of these two blogs. A handful of people replied and it seemed to be even stevens. So, after looking at a couple of their blogs I decided to go for WordPress. However, personalising it seemed a bit fiddly and so I went over to Edublogs and discovered I already had an account I’d set up several years ago for my practicum class!! So the long and the short of it is I’ve got two accounts one on each and have been playing around with them to see which I prefer.
I’ve obviously chosen to go with WordPress – the reason being, I could work out how to put up a voki on WordPress but not on Edublogs (although I’m sure it is possible). I have a long way to go in developing this blog but I feel like I’m off to a decent start.