Hi! I'm Kim Wick, K-12 school librarian at Warrensburg Central School in upstate New York. As a first year librarian I decided to participate in Cool Tools to expand my knowledge and to have fun learning new things!
This is my first experience with creating a blog. We use Google apps at school so I thought that using Blogger made the most sense. It was tough to decide between this and Wordpress or Edublog as those seemed to be the top recommended blogging platforms within the links I read through. Hopefully this works well for me.
I was intrigued by the Blogfolios video by Andrea Hernandez. I'd never before considered that blogging was something that students might do. I really thought blogs were a tool for writers/authors, and really creative librarians, not something that your average person utilized. It's something I'd like to spend time learning more about.
Many of our teachers have students keep portfolios and it could be beneficial and fun for students to be able to post to a blog. Something to consider would be access to computers. Our fifth/sixth grade students have laptops available in the classroom, but the rest of the elementary students use computers in labs which might make accessibility an issue. I also want to look more closely at Kathy Davis' first grade blogposts. There's one first grade teacher in particular that I believe would be perfect to start something like that with.
Down the road I'd like to consider blogging at the high school level as well. I might consider a blogging about books theme or something like that to get students interested. At the high school students would need to come to the media center to have access to computers, but that isn't as difficult for them as it is for elementary students. They have more freedom to move about and often come to the library during study halls.
In looking at some of the blogs that were used for examples and had information about blogging (Gwyneth Jones and Paul Wagner) I noticed that their pages use very vivid colors and dark backgrounds. They seem difficult to read to me. I've read Gwyneth Jones blogs many times over the years and the content is fantastic, but tough on the eyes. It's something I wanted to keep in mind as I worked on the setup of my blog. I felt drawn to the background I've used here, but found that it ended up having that dark background with the orange font for headings. I tried to get rid of the orange, but can't seem to figure out how to do it.
The basic set-up on Blogger was pretty easy. Finding a template and getting started was not as daunting as I expected it to be. I'm excited to have started the cool tools course and look forward to delving into the next thing and adding to my blog as I learn more about the features and options.
This is my first experience with creating a blog. We use Google apps at school so I thought that using Blogger made the most sense. It was tough to decide between this and Wordpress or Edublog as those seemed to be the top recommended blogging platforms within the links I read through. Hopefully this works well for me.
I was intrigued by the Blogfolios video by Andrea Hernandez. I'd never before considered that blogging was something that students might do. I really thought blogs were a tool for writers/authors, and really creative librarians, not something that your average person utilized. It's something I'd like to spend time learning more about.
Many of our teachers have students keep portfolios and it could be beneficial and fun for students to be able to post to a blog. Something to consider would be access to computers. Our fifth/sixth grade students have laptops available in the classroom, but the rest of the elementary students use computers in labs which might make accessibility an issue. I also want to look more closely at Kathy Davis' first grade blogposts. There's one first grade teacher in particular that I believe would be perfect to start something like that with.
Down the road I'd like to consider blogging at the high school level as well. I might consider a blogging about books theme or something like that to get students interested. At the high school students would need to come to the media center to have access to computers, but that isn't as difficult for them as it is for elementary students. They have more freedom to move about and often come to the library during study halls.
In looking at some of the blogs that were used for examples and had information about blogging (Gwyneth Jones and Paul Wagner) I noticed that their pages use very vivid colors and dark backgrounds. They seem difficult to read to me. I've read Gwyneth Jones blogs many times over the years and the content is fantastic, but tough on the eyes. It's something I wanted to keep in mind as I worked on the setup of my blog. I felt drawn to the background I've used here, but found that it ended up having that dark background with the orange font for headings. I tried to get rid of the orange, but can't seem to figure out how to do it.
The basic set-up on Blogger was pretty easy. Finding a template and getting started was not as daunting as I expected it to be. I'm excited to have started the cool tools course and look forward to delving into the next thing and adding to my blog as I learn more about the features and options.
Great blog post and ideas!
ReplyDeleteFinding some of the color/text options in blogger is a challenge. But this should help. When you;'re in your admin panel, click on:
Template --> Customize (button under the image of your live blog) --> Advanced
Then you'll see a list of all the different text areas in your blog. Kind of fun to play with the options!
Thanks for the info on changing the font. I muted that nasty orange and like the page much more! :)
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