Reflecting on Step 5 of ‘Building your PLN’: Using blogs.
Tonight I am reading Step 5 of Edublogs’ Building your PLN course.
I am inspired by Sue Waters who says:
I’m sure that lots of people would be totally surprised by the fact that initially I really struggled with the concept of blogging — ‘Why would anyone blog and why would anyone read their blogs?’
It took almost a year from being shown what a blog was to becoming a blogger.
The online tools I used before blogging were excellent for sharing information. But blogging gave me what they lacked; the ability to reflect, collaborate, exchange ideas, and connect with other people.
Ultimately, blogging completely changed my life; it’s the reason why I’m now employed to do the work I do and blogging helped me build a strong PLN.
(Sue, if you read this post, have I included the quote correctly?)
I’m hoping to have a similarly life-changing experience!
I didn’t know that you can use Flipboard to curate your blogs! I’m going to check that out!
Personally I do like it when when bloggers send me an email letting me know when they have a new blog, but I also find a lot of interesting blog posts through Twitter.
Using RSS feeds and Feedly is something I’ve never tried but I might look into in the future.
I found the question, ‘why blog when you can microblog?’, very interesting. Firstly I had never heard of ‘microblogging’ before but I now understand that it is simply commenting on Tweets or Facebook posts. I guess it is a good start, but clearly, as with everything, the more you put in the more you get out. This particularly post that I’m writing tonight is more of a brain dump, but I must say that I’m quite enjoying the process!
What better way to spend a Saturday evening. Great work, Kirsty! I agree with the statement, ‘the more you put in, the more you get out’. It takes seconds to like a tweet or write a quick social media comment but digging deeper on a blog really can be a lot more transformative!
Kathleen
Thanks for your ongoing encouragement and support, Kathleen. Really appreciate it! 😊
Hi Kirsty
You quoted correctly but it is also worth linking to the location of the original location. Linking to articles, websites or another person’s post when you write about them allows your readers who want to be able to easy check out the information to click on the link without needing to Google.
I’ve quickly edited your post to show how I would link (hope that was okay?) but showing is easier than explaining. For example, I have now linked the words Step 5 of the Edublogs Building your PLN course to the URL and I linked the words ‘who says” to the post on my blog. I could have linked either ‘Sue Waters who says’ or ‘who says’. Linking to ‘who says’ visually looked better.
You’ll find information on how I added the links here – http://help.edublogs.org/add-links/
Microblogging is great for quick reflections and brainstorming of ideas. Blogging allows you to collect those thoughts and reflect more deeply.
Sue Waters
@suewaters
Hi Sue,
Thanks! That is great! I will learn a bit more about adding links.
Really appreciate your help!
Cheers,
Kirsty