Unique Ed Techie: Blogger

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Why Blog?

I am taking a 5 week course with East Carolina University and the course funded by my employer for my particular career field, CP 32, Training, Capability, and Doctrine Warfighting Developers. I am never one to turn down learning opportunities particularly if they have value added to my career field and my cost is more in my time than currency. I consider my time extremely valuable and learning something new everyday is great, but every now and then you need to be the formal documented student.

For subscribers to the blog, you are aware of my extremely painful decision to put my doctoral studies on hold for the sake of family issues. If this is the first time visiting the blog based on the class assignment, "Welcome!".

For the final assignment, one option is to blog. The blog can be on any topic and must contain at least three entries. This has been a class full of web based experiments and writing. We hit the ground running and will not stop until July 26.

So one of the three posts required for the assignment is this one. If you have not seen my blog posts come through the stream lately it is because the days and hours are filled with work, school, and family.

So whether you are new to blogging, given up on blogging, or a seasoned blogger, like those in the blog list on the right that I subscribe to..."Why blog?" For those that know me, the better question is "Why not blog?"

Here are a few links from my knowledge sharing passionistas that I connect with by reading their blogs, following them on Twitter, Google+, or Linkedin, or maybe all of them. Thanks to my personal and professional learning network (PLN) there is not one day that I do not learn something from, because, or in spite of you. It is not possible to list and describe every blog that impacts my digital footprint. In no particular order:

Principal Eric Sheninger's blog, A Principal's Reflections (2012), Why Blog?
Steven Downes, Half an Hour (2009), Blogging in Education
Will Richardson, Weblogg-ed (2004), The Blogging in Schools Question
OEDb, Top 100 Education Blogs (n.d.)
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher
Richard Byrne, Free Technology For Teachers
US Army Combined Arms Center

I could probably write a blog post once a week on how blogging (individual and collaborative) has impacted my life, fulfilled my autodidactism needs, improved my writing, reading, comprehension, connected me with people and information that I would not have a chance to in the F2F environment, share good and bad news, provide an outlet for those who do not have another method to "just get it out", provide a personal audit trail of information, share lessons learned...and many more reasons. Hmmm...maybe an idea for the next homework blog post.

Thanks again to those people supporting my web experiments during this short, fun, and productive class.
Comments, recommendations, reaction box checks, and +1s are appreciated.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Google Inside Search

Another cool Google site to tinker with: Google Inside Search using the Chrome Extension Blog This
Google Inside Search Google deals with more than 1 billion queries a day from all around the world returning results on an average of 0.25 seconds.

Google Under the Hood - Experiments Lab, Life of a Query, Instant Search, Search Globe.

Dive into Search and learn more about what happens behind the scenes of Google Search. Play with our Experiments Lab and get a better look at the technology behind Google.