Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Extra! Extra! Voice in the Wilderness Gets Heard!

This is no post bemoaning how I wish more people thought like me. I've read lots of blogs like that and I don't think it's very useful. Not for me, anyways. I have tried to maintain a positive blog. No, rather this is about how people need to be willing to just jump in and try stuff when it comes to the Internet. And by "people" I mean me.

Two years ago, a teacher whose opinion I value saw a blogsite I was using and asked if I had tried using our district's SharePoint license to set up a SharePoint virtual classroom (SharePoint is a Microsoft web page making product that allows you to share documents, stream video, etc). I said "no, I had never heard of it", and so I put off learning about it for months. I did get around to trying it, and now I teach workshops for beginners on how to setup virtual classrooms on SharePoint.

Two months ago, a teacher asked me if I knew about "feedburner"(a tool that helps people subscribe to your site, and gives you get stats about numbers of people who subscribe to your site, or how many click on links you put on your site). I still don't fully utilize all its features, and I only have a beginner's understanding of what makes Feedburner work. But I now know I have at least 6 subscribers, (and thanks for subscribing). I was hesitant to start, because when I asked people I knew about feedburner, I got a lot of nebulous answers. But, courage in the computer age is the willingness to give stuff a shot, and its free. No harm in trying, right?


Two days ago I parent asked me if I tried "utterz.com", and I had never heard about it. It's like twitter (a micro blog, sort of), but you can phone it in, or record it on the Internet. I checked it out. Great privacy policy, very simple (they don't give out private information ever). And, while they have a Vancouver number, I just did my first "utter" over the Internet, "what will be tomorrow's problem?" . I think I did it late last night, and this morning I see 13 people have listened to it. Someone actually responded to my question and it was quite a good response. If you want to check me out on utterz.com, I am " jagill." I tried to post it to my blog here, but it didn't work. Yet. I'll figure it out as I go. Keep moving forward.

No comments: