Thing 2: Online Communities and Personal Learning Networks

I have a FB page and use it in my personal life. To use verbage from cool tools you could say I "lurk" on FB a bit - I check it everyday but don't post much - mostly pictures of special events. I enjoy following others and mostly started one because my two children have one.
 I don't have a Twitter account.  I  looked at Twitter and now finally understand what all those hashtag names are.  I always thought they were people's account names. You see these pop up more and more during television shows - tweets to follow. Twitter seems to be the next generation of listserves.  I don't think I will get a Twitter account right now.  I have three emails now that I have added this gmail account and FB to follow and this blog to keep up.  It does look like a helpful place to go for info though. I found many great articles.
Can you search for a particular topic within a hashtag?
It took me a while to get used to the format - very short messages, the abbreviated website links followed by all those hashtags  - very different than other social media tools.

 

I'm finding that on this blog platform - Blogspot - the security letters and numbers that you have to type to verfiy and submit your post are often very hard to read even with my glasses on :).  I have to go through three or four of them before I am successful.  Is anyone else having this issue on Blogspot?  Is it an issue on the other platforms?

Picked up my iPad today and using it for my post!  I like typing with it, but some of the websites I visit on a daily basis require an app, which is frustrating since I have no way to get apps at the moment.   Will check with Colleen to see if there is a district account that will be put on here.  Also I can't get my district email on here.

Thing 1: Blogging - Well this first lesson turned out to be a challenge for me.  I thought I set up the blog, but it was just my gmail profile.  I then did set-up my blog, but not sure how I got there :)  I then had to figure out how to get the URL name.  Then I couldn't get back in as the owner.  I think I have it now.  So far the first night I've learned many things about blogs - the first being it wasn't as easy as I thought, but I stuck with it.

I did it!  I'm a newbie to blogging.  Looking forward to the class and working with everyone!