Yes Tech!

Steve Dembo at Teach42 is hosting a 30 day challenge to bloggers, and I have kept up with his challenge.  I continue to enjoy the daily tips and ideas to improve my blog. 

Here are some of changes I made to Yes Tech!:

• Created a new RSS feed.  I may have inadvertantly lost some of my previous subscribers in the process (sorry about that), but it didn’t appear to be working well.  We’ll see what happens! 
• Learned about Browsershots, a tool that lets you preview any web page in many different browsers with one click.
• Spiffed up my sidebar: added a pull-down menu to my archived blog posts.   I’ve been blogging for two years now, and the list was getting too long to keep in the sidebar.  Happy birthday to Yes Tech!
• Added a “contact me” form to make it easy for folks to easily ask questions and keep in touch.
• Laurie Fowler from Fresh Fowlers was a guest blogger on my blog, and I was a guest blogger on her blog.  I really enjoyed this swap with Laurie!
• Created a “Best of Yes Tech!” page with links to some of my favorite blog posts.
• I continue to watch the data from Google Analytics.  I am now able to see where my readers come from, what sites referred them, what keywords they used in a search engine to land at my site, and more.

Thanks, Teach42, for organizing the challenge!

Steve Dembo at Teach42 is hosting a 30 day challenge to bloggers, and I decided to begin the journey with him one week ago.  I have really enjoyed the daily tips and it has re-energized my desire to keep my blog up-to-date.  I recenly am finding a lot of benefit from microblogging with my professional learning network on Plurk, and spending less time writing thoughtful entries on my blog.  I know that writing blog entries makes me a more reflective practitioner, and I now have new goals to spend more time thinking, setting goals, and sharing with others on my blog. 

During the first week of the challenge, I learned that a professor at the University of Rhode Island uses one of my blog entries, ”Cover the Material or Teach Students to Think“ as part of her grad class’ curriculum.  I wrote this entry in Feb 07 after reading an article in Educational Leadership magazine.  Students read the original article, then my blog post, then comment on a class wiki.  I learned this as a result of signing up for Google Analytics.  Pretty cool!

The other major highlight of the week was learning about the Google Translate widget.  You can convert an entire webpage to another language (35choices) with one click.  I added this widget it to my blog, and then shared it with my district’s Bilingual/ESL Coordinator.  After a brief look she was anxious to share it with her staff.  I tried posting the widget on our district webpage, and it worked there as well.  This little widget could really help many families who speak a primary language other than English!

There were other benefits to participating in this challenge.  I found some dead links on my blogroll and added a Creative Commons License.  I also met some new like-minded people who are also participating in the challenge. 

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License