"Just do it!" - Nike Commercial

I am a person who enjoys challenges. I’m very used to setting personal goals, creating an action plan, checking off each step in the process and delighting in seeing tangible progress towards achieving my goal. In order to develop my first ever blog, I decided to apply the same approach. Talk about the best-laid plans…

I read Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, which helped me understand the basics of a good blog and consider some classroom applications. I then spent hours looking at examples of online blogs, trying to create a list of features that I might wish to include in my own first effort and to figure out which blogs to subscribe to. I watched “Blogs in Plain English” on YouTube and I read about tips on how to set up a blog. I noted the URLs of the blog layouts I found the most appealing – perhaps a slightly unorthodox approach - but this was my strategy to finally decide on using the Blogspot blog creation tool.

Before getting down to work, I checked out all the blogs posted by my EDES 501 classmates so I had a vision of the final product. This is when I fell apart! Everyone’s blogs looked so gorgeous and inviting, and included many interesting add-ons and thoughtful comments, and all my anxieties about this project surfaced. I was stalled, I couldn’t start - my brain cells simply shut down. I think you’d call this a meltdown. I’d done hours of work and yet had nothing tangible to show for my efforts. It took a reassuring phone conversation from Joanne to finally realize that it was the journey – the process – upon which I needed to focus and not the final product. Joanne assured me that as I learned more, the blog could be edited and changed and that I wasn’t the only one who was feeling so nervous about starting. This response of being totally overwhelmed was not unlike the experience of total immersion as one learns a new language. It reminded me of former German classes in college and how intensely one had to concentrate on learning new vocabulary, pronunciation and grammatical rules, until finally overload hit and you ceased to function as a rational being.

Obviously, after another day of contemplation and procrastination, I finally did manage to sit down and get started. But I’ve got to say I was just like those students in your class who become suddenly very busy and have to sharpen their pencils, visit the washroom, or throw something in the garbage can – anything to avoid getting started on the task. I can really appreciate these avoidance strategies having found them equally comforting. But once I decided to tackle creating a blog, amazingly the process was easier than I thought. One of the hardest things was creating a title for the blog and finding a URL name.

I still haven’t quite figured out the “big picture” idea behind blogs. I am not used to sharing my private written thoughts and can’t quite understand the reason why individuals would simply publish their innermost reflections and thoughts publicly on the web. In my searching I stumbled across blogs that contained quite personal details. I think as one blogs you really have to think about purpose and your audience, which could be anyone from your school superintendent to a young student. I can certainly appreciate Richardson’s advice about safety and the need to inform parents if you decide to use a blog in your classroom. Give me a few more weeks to get comfortable with this medium and probably the possibilities and ramifications of blogging will begin to emerge more clearly.