Colette Cassinelli’s edtech VISION

DAY THREE:  WRITE A THANK YOU NOTE

Pick out a blogger who in some way influenced your decision to begin blogging and write them a thank you note.

A major influence in my professional development as a computer teacher happened during my Masters of Educational Technology program at Pepperdine University.  This online Master’s program introduced me to blogging as a reflective practice.  My cadre leader, Bill Moseley set up a group blog for us to review and reflect on our learning throughout the program.  It was awkward at first – “I have to write?” – but I found drawn to reading my classmates postings and realized how similar my journey was to theirs.  Especially for an online program it was critical to have this insight into each others learning process.  We also shared lesson ideas, links, and reviewed software programs.  Not all cadre members loved the blogging but I learned so much from reading and writing the blog and felt even more connected to my classmates.  It was a great experience.

During the program, I set up a blog on Blogger to document the results of my Action Research Project.    My focus was engaging students with authentic technology projects.  As I worked and reworked lessons for my ARP, I documented student progress, my reactions, and student’s own reflections.

I started this blog at www.edtechvision.org as soon as graduated from the OMET program.  It has been a wonderful journey.  There have been times when I first started that I felt like I was talking to no one except myself – but slowly my personal learning network has grown.

So here’s my thank you.  Thanks to Bill Moseley, Gary Stager, Paul Sparks, Cynthia Solomon, Melissa Anderson, Jeff Lee, and ESPECIALLY all my Cadre 9 Bucca9ers for teaching me about learning – and learning how to learn.  I will be forever thankful.

During the month of November, Steve Dembo at http://www.teach42.com/ has invited everyone to participate in the 30 Days to being a Better Blogger challenge.  My blogging has been sporadic lately – so I’m in.  Steve has asked participants to tag their posts with “30D2BBB”.

DAY ONE:  THE ABOUT ME PAGE

The About page is absolutely critical to a blog. It provides visitors insight into who the author is, what they can expect to see on the blog, and what sort of lenses the information is being viewed through.

There are two key questions your about page should answer.

• Who is the author of this blog?
• What is this blog all about?

So I took a peek at my About Me page and decided to make a few changes.  First of all, I’ve barely updated the page since I first started blogging.  I used terminology like “last year” and “upcoming” which are too vague even though I do include an updated date.

The brief introduction is fine and I share where and what I teach and some of my interests. The one thing that is lacking is a better description of my blog’s purpose and audience.  Right now that information is buried in an early post but I dug it out and refreshed it for my page.  I also included a link to my VoiceThread 4 Education wiki.

DAY TWO:  SITE TRAFFIC

Take a good close look at your blog’s statistics. We want to know who’s visiting, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, and much much more. By watching your statistics carefully, you can learn all sorts of interesting information about your blog and your audience.

I use W3 Counter to track my blog traffic and the daily traffic is embedded right into my WordPress dashboard.  Since I don’t have quite as much traffic as Steve, I am always interested in when all of sudden the traffic to my site jumps up.  Usually its because I have blogged about a current news topic and the search engines pick up my post.  One of my top results still come from “motivational posters” when I discussed how I use Big Huge Labs to have my students make posters and embed them into their blogs.  I guess lots of people are searching for motivational posters on the Internet.

Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to your blog -but don’t overdo it.  Only link your blog when you want to share a special project when you are looking for collaborators or sharing an important story.   I also receive some traffic from Stumble Upon, RSS feeds at Google Reader, the Classroom 2.0 Ning and the wiki I made at VoiceThead 4 Education.

It’s good to review the stats and I’m going to take some time to review which posts are most popular and see if I can find a trend.

I’m not blogging for popularity – I do it for my own reflection – but it is interesting to see what I am saying has the most impact.

JOIN THE CHALLENGE!