Hot Bliggety Blog

I've been asked to develop a workshop on teaching blogging in the classroom. My first goal with this is to make these other teachers bloggers themselves, before they try to teach it to their students. I need your help with a few things.

What do you consider your most important rule/ guideline in blogging?

What's been your best experience in blogging?

And a little embarrassing, but I have to submit one of my own blog posts for this. I haven't a clue as to how to pick which one. If a post I have written has stuck in your head, please let me know that, too. It can be on anything.

You all are the best. Always. Thank you so much for being such terrific, supportive friends.

A Brief Hiatus

I am taking a short hiatus from blogging while I go to a conference for the next week and then my family will join me for a visit with our older daughter. We are greatly looking forward to it!

I didn't want you to think I was neglecting you by not commenting, but I look forward to catching up on all your news and stories when I return.

I pray all who have been sick/ injured return to health, I wish moments of stillness for those who have been ultra busy, and I hope peace for those who have been feeling stress.

I want to leave you with something that brings me joy and contentment. Here are some pics from our front yard in the springtime when the wildflowers abound.

These are some of the bovine friends I write about with bluebonnets in the foreground.

And here are more bluebonnets with a rare pink bluebonnet thrown in. The little bee there seems to like pink, too.

Take care of yourselves, my bloggy friends- I'll see you again in about ten days!

Bloggers: I Need Some Help, Please

In an earlier post, I detailed here some of the reasons I started blogging last month. I have been so impressed with the bloggers I have met here and how unfailingly kind you have been to me.

Because I am still so new to blogging, but also because I want to make this the best experience I can for my students when they start to blog, I would really like to read what you consider your best and or favorite posts. If you can provide me a link to them, I know I will have some enjoyable reading ahead of me.

I truly had a ball reading your thoughtful answers to the post I linked to above.

I have already pored through many of your past posts if I follow you, but I want to know which one(s) are your favorites. If you want to include links to favorites others have written, please feel free to do so.

Thank-you!

My Blogging Experiment is Over- Thank You!

At the beginning of this summer, I gave myself an assignment. I assigned myself to write a blog entry for as many days as I could this summer. I have completed that assignment and thus my blogging experiment as well.

My purpose was two-fold. I am incorporating blogging into my curriculum and I don't want to teach something I've never done. And, after almost three decades of teaching writing, I had ceased being a writer myself. The only things of length I've been writing are grants, analyses, and reports. Ugh. Yuck.

I'd lost that creative part of me and gave myself this summer to find it again.

It was difficult at first. I felt like I was running naked through Wal-Mart at times, baring my thoughts and feelings to folks I've never met. And here's a secret. No one I know IRL has the faintest idea I have a blog, so the only ones who read it are you kind people who don't even know me. But, I think I'm going to go ahead and tell the folks who know me about this blog so they can read it if they like.

My own writing skills are rusty. I look back at some of my first posts from last month and think I could have said that better. Why did I use those words? Wow, that kind of sounds boring. I'm slowly finding my voice again.

I discovered something else, too. I've pored through your blogs, studying past posts in depth, seeing what folks like to comment on and what they don't. I want to have the fullest information I can when I present this to my students.

And what I've discovered is there are some really great people out there. I wasn't expecting to find so many people I'd be pleased to know in real life and have as neighbors. Your comments on my posts have been unfailingly kind.

I am enriched by all the things I've learned from you and through you.

And, although my blogging experiment is over, I think I will continue adding to it.

I would also like to know a few things from you veteran bloggers, if you care to comment.

Why do you blog?


What are your favorite topics to blog about?


How do you decide what to include in your blog?

What topics do you like to read about in other's blogs?

Thank you, folks!