Thing 1: Blogging

I am Mary Ann Leonard-Sheets and I am the SLMS at Thomas A. Edison HS (home of the Spartans!) in Elmira Heights, NY.  This is my fifth year at TAE and this year I am also teaching AIS English 9 to 80 Freshmen in addition to running the library.  We are a small school so many of us pull double duty.  I am on the Tech Committee, Safety Committee, DDI Committee, and Curriculum Committee.  In addition I am the Freshman Class Advisor, Faculty Auditor, and Yearbook Coordinator.  I am also the Vice-President of our local school librarian's group and a Regional Coordinator for NYLA. 

Since I work closely with the all the faculty to implement the District curriculum, including the new  Common Core curriculum, I am always looking for ways to engage our students and help them become great digital citizens.  And because I'm a librarian, I just love techie stuff so I thought this was a great opportunity to learn some things that may benefit both students and staff in the world of Web 2.0 and 3.0!  When the library services director sent out the email it just seemed like a natural fit for me to get some great tips from other great librarians and teachers.

I knew about Blogs but honestly I have had the kids engage in this activity yet.  Our Superintendent is very careful about how students engage online and so I've kind of shied away from blogs because they need to be so very carefully monitored.  I love the suggestions of KidBlog (previously unknown to me) and Weebly (which I tried once when it first came out but I haven't tried the educators' version).  I set this Blog up through Google because many of my kids are "Googleophites" and because I also I trying to push our District to move to Google for Educators.  It was easy-squeasy to set this up and hopefully as I go along I will find more fun ways to improve it.  I'm sure my kids and staff would have no trouble making some great blogs through Google's Blogger, however, I'm not sure I'm sold on the teacher's ability to control accounts so I may have a teacher try KidBlog (but I think my high school kids will miss having some of the bells and whistles of other Blogs).  Weebly just doesn't give me enough student accounts. 

I look forward to reading what others found out when creating their blogs.  I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to learn from all of you!

Mary Ann