Let the blogging begin!

My journey to the world of blogging has taken me through sites like: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, CBSportsline, ESPN, de.li.cious, and much more. To say I am a rookie at this is wrong, but to say I am a connoisseur of blogs is also incorrect. My goal, in setting up a blog (that I can call my own) is to be reflective in a different sort of way than on my sports websites where I used to argue on threads about which football team had a better chance of making the playoffs.

That said...

I felt like I had a huge hangover at work, all day Monday! I know what you must be thinking, "He had too much fun over the New Year's weekend." While my New Year's was fun, my lifelessness was largely due to the fact that I spent much of the week off inhaling paint fumes in my basement from painting the walls and floor; a weekend of hanging out with old friends, which meant staying up much later than most any teacher is used to staying up (past 10 PM!); and on top of that chose Monday to begin my Green Bay Cellcom Marathon training day...at 4:45 AM. Monday was the most sluggish school day of my career! Upon entering my classroom, I was welcomed to the heater blowing a steady 80 degree blast of air out of the ceiling; which was not going to help my sleep deprivation. Next, my students were just TOO quiet and orderly when coming into the room. Something was up! These kids were exhausted from similar reasons to my own. As the hour hand on my clock painstakingly did 8 full revolutions, my students finally began to wake up to the reality that they were stuck inside our sauna of a room for the next five months. At the end of the day, after watching 23 slugs (including myself) sludge out of the room, I thought to myself, "Is it just because it is January? Should I really be waking up at 4:40 AM, just to run? Why does my head hurt so bad?"

Sure enough, today was a day when I told my wife on the drive home, "I'm back! Today, I ruled at teaching!" Let's get one thing straight, I am not full of myself, but like you, I know when I did a good job teaching and a poor job (Monday). I think my early morning runs are beginning to give me a psychological edge on my fifth graders, because they think anyone who wakes up before 5 AM is crazy. Next, the headaches are gone, and I am more alert than ever each day at school, which means my wit is even quicker than quick.

Because of my "alertness," I thought it was fitting to teach the kids how to make a list in a word document of their favorite websites by creating HYPERLINKS. This way, they could access their favorite websites quicker in the future. First and foremost, the kids were fascinated by the word HYPER. Secondly, they had finally got to do something in our computer lab that did not involve pounding/typing words like, "baseball...baseball...basketball...basketball" over and over until they could spell it better than type it. As we left the lab that day, and I asked my students if they had fun, in a chorus of various pitches (hyper) they replied, "YES!"

Then it hit me: de.li.cious

Which left me wondering, why did I waste all that time when I could have shown my students Delicious.com, "The tastiest bookmarks on the web!" Part of the reason is that my students do not yet have school emails accounts, and also because I am still learning about all the read/write (Web 2.0) tools available. Have any of you had students use Delicious.com? If so, any successes? If not, for what reasons?

I look forward to joining in on the world of blogging, which already seems like it will be a "6 Cups of Coffee Later" type of experience.

So long, for now...

Chris