What is....Blogger?

How many times have you been in a meeting, or on a train or in a crowd or at a party, and someone starts talking about some social-web-internetty-media-thing-a-ma-bob like it's the second coming of you know who and you have no idea what they are talking about? It might as well have been a new laundry detergent in Croatia.

Me too. I don't pretend to know everything or even a lot of things or more than the next guy. What I do have going for me however is a want, no need, to know about things. New things and in particular, techie things.

So here's something new. I will endeavor to explain, in as few words as possible, stuff. Stuff like Facebook, Twitter, DropBox etc. If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Blogger

Well first off, this is blogger. The blog you are reading was created here as part of an online course called The 23 Things Wilton Teachers Should Know About web 2.0. It was an assignment when I took the course and I just keep adding to it.

Blogger is a Blogging platform co-created by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan while at Pyra Labs. It was initially designed as a note taking feature in another software product but eventually spun off as a separate platform. Evan is credited by some with creating the word "blogger" and helping popularize the term "blog" which is short for web-log. He sold it to Google. He later co-founded Twitter.

Blogger is a highly user friendly blogging platform. It allows you to post articles containing text, photos, video and, if you're feeling adventurous, custom html coding.

The platform allows you to to use "labels" which are like Twitter hashtags and aide in the organization of content over a long period. Let's say you're writing about "Math" but more specifically about the second grade use of arrays to illustrate the solutions to multiplication problems. You could use the tags "math",  "2nd grade", "Multiplication", "arrays" to help keep things organized.  You can make your labels available to your readers as kind of a live index. It's fabulous.

Scheduling allows you to write several articles, say on a Sunday afternoon in your PJs, and set them to post on different days during the week.

Blogger is a great tool for students to post work and for teachers to build portfolios of class work. I used it to create a poetry blog for students in the k-2 school where I work called Poemasabi Jr. where we posted student created poems under pen names for them to share with their immediate and extended families.

There are apps for Android, iOS and Windows phones and tablets as well as the ability to post using any browser on Windows and Apple computers.

In short, play with it. Use it to share your thoughts on something you love, perhaps a hobby? Then you'll find ways to use it in your classroom.


Comments