Monday, February 16, 2009

Thing 3: Blog Search Tools

"Thang 3"
Stressing at being so behind. I worked on this a few nights ago and managed to translate it into Hindi, a skill I did not realize I had.

After returning my post to English, I decided to start completely over.

Okay, so I managed to claim my blog, but could not figure out how to get the technorati lable to appear on my blog page. Disappointing. I know it has to do with pasting the html into the html, but I feel a bit like Frankstein working on his monster. "What if I stick this little organ here? What could it hurt?"

I always thought that blogs were for beings who liked to listen to themselves expound on whatever issue rocked their boat. Now I realize that it is fairly sophisticated boat rocking. I find that I am printing out some of the resource pages so that I can have time to go back and play more. Instead of 23 things, I could probably do just this one for the next few weeks.

I did try different searches using Technorati and Search Blogs with Ask.com. (It was the first one on my list). What impressed me was the amount of interesting stuff that I pulled up on both searches. I found a good lesson plan that I will probably be using in the next week. I also found that I can get sucked into cool stuff like Alice falling down the Rabbit Hole.

Here is how this is affecting me. No sooner did Blogging come up in 23 things, then blogging with my fifth graders became a new adventure. They are reading Homeless Bird by Whelan and have been doing lots of research in the library to build their knowledge base on India. (Thank you, God, for teachers like Mr. Freeman who love the library). Mr. Freeman and I found that we had to consider the propriety of setting up gmail accounts for each of the ten year olds in his classroom. This meant letters to parents to get permission and getting the blessing of our administration. Extra hoops albeit critical ones.

So far, the blog has been lots of fun. I hope the kids start to use it more and make more comments. I am planning to start a blog on the media center Web site so that I can "book talk" some of the new books in the library. So I guess I am now one of those people who like to listen to themselves. Or maybe we are just hoping that someone else will stop by and engage?

I don't know if this works or is kosher, but here is the url for the blog:
http://freemanhomelessbird.blogspot.com/?zx=1fea651f5444d82b

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