Bibbity, bobbity, bling! The Wonder of Widgets

The challenge--   
1. Add widgets to your sidebar--check
2. Have a visitor tracking widget on your blog--check, check.
3. Spring clean your sidebar--check, check, check
4. Take a walk through your side bar and see what you like--check, check, check, check.


I thought first I should assess the widgets I had so here is my list (some of these are from an earlier blog challenge, but others are recent editions as a result of this Teacher Challenge).
RSS Feed (thank you Will Richardson for helping me understand this at NECC 2007 in Atlanta), Pages (didn’t know I could do this, but I love it!), Introduction to me (with new cartoonized avatar), Email (does anyone use this anymore?), Search Engine for Fresh Fowlers (does this even work if I am not good about tagging my posts?), Clustrmap visitor locator (love to see all those red dots from outside the US and from all over the US, too!),  Blog List (definitely need to update this and keep updating it on a more regular basis), My Personality badge info (this is fun and VERY accurate for me!), a Yahoo avatar of myself (as I hoped I would look after becoming a lifetime Weight Watchers member), Creative Commons License (good thing to have), a Blog Archive link (not very helpful because it only gives the month not the year and I can’t seem to undo that), and finally a K-12 Online Conference 2008 badge (where I was a presenter). Whew, that is tiring to complete the list which leads me to believe I definitely need to do some spring cleaning.  I am getting rid of the Search Engine, the Blog List, the Yahoo Avatar, and the Blog Archive Link.  


Hmm having a really hard time finding widgets that I like that don’t feel like I am cluttering up the sidebar.  I’ll need to go and see what other folks have on their sidebars and see what strikes my fancy.


So I added these widgets. . .  
1. A weekly poll that hopefully my students at UWA and my other blog readers will answer.  
2. A list of books I am currently reading from Shelfari.
3. LinkRolls from My Delicious
4. My tag cloud from My Delicious

So what do you think about my additions? Is my page too cluttered with widgets? I am really looking for some feedback. I get too addicted to new gadgets/widgets so I might need reigning in!

Who Knew?

http://bit.ly/e6a54v

I had no idea that I could add pages to my blog. What an eyeopening experience! :)  I don’t know why I had never explored my blog page beyond the posts and comments even when I did a previous blog challenge where I beefed up my sidebar, butI absolutely love Pages!  I never knew this was an option.

I had great fun creating my About Me page and then looked back at what people had said about great posts and I decided to take these bits of advice for my About Me page.  I added links to the things I mentioned and added pictures that I thought were interesting. I also asked for feedback via email since you cannot comment on a Page in a blog. Nothing yet, but I am trying to be patient. But now that I am posting this to the blog, maybe I will get comments here.

In my looking at other About Me pages, I did find some good ideas. For one, I added a Blogs I Have Commented On page because I saw it on Malyn’s About Me  page was very informative with information about her technology life and beyond. I also liked the idea of having a Portfolio Page on my blog; this idea came from Kirby .  BerryArt’s Blog also had a great About Me page.  On Lydia’s About Me  page , I really liked that she put her avatar and her actual photo up on the page. Also, I checked out Paula’s page and at first was not impressed, but I didn’t wait for the Glogster to load. After it did, all I can say is WOW!

So this activity #3 in the Blogging Challenge  seems to have been good for lots of us. I still need to go and leave specific comments on the pages I mentioned above, but I am working on it.  We are learning new things, going to other blogs, leaving comments, and sharing our ideas with others.  Hip, Hip, Hooray!

My K12 Online Conference Experience

Once upon a time on a blog post far, far away, I saw a promo for something called the K12 Online Conference. I was intrigued since I was not able to travel to conferences at the moment because of a decided slow down in my cash flow. So I went to the promo page and read about the K12 Online Conference concept. It was very simple—online presentations were shared with people from around the globe—and everything was free! No cost to register, no travel expenses, no giveaways—just online learning and sharing from passionate learners like me.

I downloaded the application to present and ruminated over it for a while. At the same time, I was in an online course learning how to develop online professional development courses for teachers. My topic was reading and web 2.0 tools so I decided to give that a try for the K12 Online Conference. And much to my surprise and delight, Reading Revolution: New Texts and New Technologies was accepted for the K12 Online Conference 2008. I was even more excited when I saw that it was a fairly exclusive group chosen to present. I was on the same presenter list as Vicki Davis, Chris Lehmann, Sharon Betts, Cheryl Oakes, Brian Crosby, and Scott McLeod! Yikes! Nothing like being a newbie with the "big dogs"!

I posted my K12 Online Conference teaser using Animoto and received some great feedback. I grew both more excited and more nervous as the conference approached. And as it approached, I couldn’t figure out how to video my 20 minute presentation since I didn't have a video camera and a Flip camera was not in my budget. So, I finally decided to do it a little differently and I created a wiki as my presentation. I showcased using blogs, wikis, and podcasts for encouraging students to read.

So the actual conference arrived and my presentation went live on October 22, 2008. I had 2 live chats the day the presentation was posted and talked with people from the UK, Canada, and the US. I posted a message on Plurk for the live chat two of my Plurk buddies, loonyhiker and agapejen, joined me to talk about my presentation. It was great! I also chatted with a concerned dad and pharmacist from Canada about the pros and cons of using multimedia for reading as opposed to print only (but that is another post!). Later in the week, I participated in the Fireside Chat for all presenters and keynoters from Week 1 of the conference. We used Elluminate to talk, share, listen, and chat with folks from all over about the presentations from the first week. In this online arena, I met people from Los Angeles, San Antonio, Venezuela, and Maine. Although I am a geek girl at heart and I expected to enjoy this conference, I have loved being a presenter more than I thought I would since I am also a big Face-to-Face person. I have had a great time discussing my presentation with people from around the country and around the world. And I learned some new tools along the way. Isn't this what a conference experience is supposed to be about?

Finally, I want to give a great big shout out to my convener, Darren Kuropatwa, who helped me navigate the uncharted waters of my first K12 Online Conference. Thanks so much! And another shout out to all the people who make this conference a possibility—you know who you are!