Reflection on blogging

In my first adventure in blogging, I learned that it really is pretty easy to set up. Once you play with it a little bit, the tools are user-friendly and easy to figure out on your own. I'm not yet sure how I would use this in my classroom, but I think that it could be a great tool for communicating with colleagues -- within the school, within the district, and elsewhere -- in order to bounce ideas around and share lessons and links. The only questions I have right now are: do I have enough time to keep up with this and/or is it worth that amount of time and effort (little though it may be) and how can I make the page prettier? I played with the color schemes and picked a layout I thought I liked, but I'm still not happy with its appearance.

Some other blogs to explore

Here are a couple of other blogs I've found to be interesting and possibly helpful.
1. http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/ilearn-technology This is a blog with a long history that includes numerous technology resources with ideas about how to use them in a classroom setting. It seems that a lot of the posts I looked at were more geared toward elementary school, but there were some neat tools for middle and high school, too.

2. http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/foreign-language-fun This one is all about teaching foreign languages. Some of the posts are more informative than others, but there are definitely some good links here.

A little bit about me

My name is Andrea Larson, and I'm a Spanish teacher at McNeil High School in Austin Texas. I've been teaching at McNeil for 7 years and for 9 years in all. An interesting tid bit -- I actually graduated from McNeil as well.

On the homefront, I've been married to my husband (also a McNeil graduate) for 8 years, and we have one 5 year old son who will start Kindergarten at Live Oak in a few weeks.

At this point, my blog is not for a specific purpose. I'm still just trying out the technology to see what's available and what might be the most useful for me. For now, I would say that I'm hoping to find some other blogs, and other sites in general, that will help me to better incorporate technology into my everyday teaching. I'm also hoping to get some comments and suggestions from others on how to address some of my specific issues with technology.