First of all, let me start off with saying how terrified I was of taking this class. As I said in my introduction, I am not very good with technology. It definitely is pushing me out of my comfort zone and testing my patience while learning what feels like a new language, technology language. I don’t like the feeling of not knowing how to do something and when I’m not automatically good at it, I don’t like it right away (sounds bratty, I know). I had to remind myself several times what I tell my students all the time: “Calm down. If something doesn’t immediately make sense, you might have to read it again. Read carefully. Be patient. JUST TRY IT”. So far as setting up my blog goes, it has been a lot of trial and error and re-reading, but once something clicks, it seems way easier and gives me that boost of confidence in my abilities for this class. I truly think this class will be good for me being a teacher where some students “just get it” and some need more time and practice before they are able to do it. I definitely have more empathy already. I sometimes forget what being a student is like. Things that I teach make sense to me, but it is not the same for my students, who are trying new things for the first time. I think these weekly posts will help me reflect both on this class AND how my own teaching helps students who are learning. I’ve learned so many new things in the past two weeks, but I’m going to break it up into the things I found most important/helpful!
- That RSS is a life saver. My RSS post raves about how easy it is to keep all my sites organized in one place, and I can keep track of everything I’ve read.
- Linking keeps me sane! Again with my obsession to keep things neat looking, I love that you can link text into your document instead of having big long URLs in the middle of your blog post.
- I finally know the difference between tags and categories and am in love with both! It all clicked for me when I read from Lorelle on WordPress that “Categories are the site’s table of contents. Tags are the index words.” This was an excellent analogy for me. I added both widgets to my page so it’s helpful to find what I’m looking for. It’s also helpful for me to view other blogs to look up something by either categories, or key words instead of scrolling down the entire list to try and find something.
- Creative Commons is very customizable to fit every author’s needs, which is important in the ever growing and changing needs of the internet. In my CC post, I chose attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike (CC BY NC-SA) because I want people to be able to use my work, but still credit me and not be able to profit off of it.
- I’m still struggling with flickr helper. The flickr cc attribution helper has not been working for me in the way the guides and YouTube tutorials have showed me. The hints pop-ups tell me it might be my theme I’ve chosen for my blog is not compatible. Instead of the menu option Medium.com attributor, I have to use the default setting. If anyone else had similar issues or know any way to fix this, I would love to know.
EXTRA: I wasn’t prepared to like posting about my personal life. I love to write, but I don’t usually like to share things, especially to people I have never met. I have found that writing to an unknown audience feels empowering. I don’t feel judged or self-conscious about the things I’m talking about in my posts. Maybe it’s because I don’t see or know my audience, or maybe because I can be in the comfort of my own bed sharing the thoughts I have, but either way, I like it! 🙂 Some things I’ve shared:
Jeanna's Blog 
Superb work on Bootcamp. You seem to be taking to blogging now that the set up is finished. You’re running the gamut in posts, too, from the daily observation to the considered reflection and details on CC. Just Try It seems to work!
– m
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