Thursday, January 04, 2007

Buzzed

Wow! I had read other bloggers when they talked about the thrill students got from other people writing comments on their blogs and thought to myself, "That'd be cool for my kids." But when I was reading Nancy White's Full Circle Online Interaction Blog and saw her quote from my blog, Whooosh! That was a major thrill, I was so pumped up I couldn't sit still long enough to type a response. Thank You Nancy. While I was walking the adrenaline off, I couldn't wait to set up class blogs for my students for this new semester. I wanted them to feel the rush and excitement. It was nothing like what I expected, it was better. As I was talking to some other teachers about my excitement, they got excited and wanted to create a school-wide blog so we sat down and came up with a topic and then got busy setting up that blog. What was really neat was the group I was with runs the gamut of kids for our school, normal classroom, AVID (college prep), and a special ed teacher (who actually was even more excited about the school blog idea than I was). It's interesting how a little spark at just the right time becomes a flame, let's just hope its perpetual, not a flash fire. More about the school blog later.

1 comment:

Nancy White said...

Floyd, ping me when your students' blogs are up so I can visit and if I have something constructive to add, I'd love to chime in.

I know for me when I started my current blog (it was my third try) the welcoming of people I respected was a huge boost to my practice. It made me see the network I belonged to in ways I had not appreciated. I didn't know that people were appreciating my work, nor did I have a good practice of appreciating and encouraging the work of others.

Commenting on others' blogs is one of those practices that both helps us see our networks and fire us up to keep on 'truckin!

That said, when your post showed up on my RSS feed, it made me smile broadly and gave me energy to to back to some editing I was working on. I was feeling tired. Your bit of excitement traveled all the way to my desk. Thanks!

By the way, I had revisted your blog last week as I was harvesting the URLs of all the people who commented on my blog to thank them. You had posted a comment on my blog, which helped me find you. So tending to connections also reconnects! Circular, but fun!