Thing 1: Blogging

My name is Sarah Ryan and I am the librarian at the Montessori Academy in Rochester, NY. This blog is primarily for the Cool Tools for School professional development program, but perhaps I'll turn it into something else once the program is over.

I chose to participate in Cool Tools this year because my district is going to a 1-to-1 chromebook program and is steadily becoming more Google-centric. I am all for this switch since I already use Google for many other things, and because it allows me to use something other than Microsoft programs on school computers (I am very much a Mac person). I am already very tech and social media savvy, but figured Cool Tools might introduce me to something I haven't discovered yet.

The first assignment required me to choose a blogging platform and create my blog for this program. I've had many blogs over the years, most of which were on WordPress and tumblr. I love WordPress as a blogging platform and was planning on creating my blog there, but then realized I ought to use Blogger in order to test it out myself before blogging with my students. Since all my students already have Google accounts, Blogger will (hopefully) be an easy transition for them (and will be one less password they have to memorize).

In this lesson I learned about the benefits of blogging with students. My upper elementary students are already very eager to have discussions via Google Classroom with each other, so I predict they would be just as excited to blog. It would be a great way to get them into writing book reviews and recommending books to their classmates. I also really liked the idea of starting first with "paper blogs" in order to get them used to writing posts and commenting on their classmates' posts.