30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Days 18-21

I am finding it more useful to "chunk" (dontcha love it when things you learned a long time ago are useful, I learned about "chunking" as a memory technique in a developmental psychology with Professor Ellen Wright who was one of the best professors I ever had with the absolute best uses of Bloom's taxonomy in my educational career) these 30 days challenges. So days 18-21 are:

• join a carnival
• who do you love and why?
• go on a dead link hunt
• give a comment a promotion

Join a carnival refers to posting in a blog carnival. I periodically post in the Assistive technology Blog Carnival, but I really could make more of an effort, so look forward to an entry soon on this month's topic of, "My Favorite Things".

Who do you love and why? Asks you to look at the blogs you love (that are in a similar field) and really figure out what makes them great. I know that I have about 100 blogs in my reader so I took at look at which ones I look forward to and this is what I realized: I look forward to the ones that post nearly every day, the ones that have photos, the ones that share something I can use right away and/or stories, and the ones that have a certain seriousness of purpose. I also appreciate good writing, although I don't mind a typo or two if it does not distract from the message (must be the sped teacher in me... or the dyslexic in me). Something that is not particularly useful to me as a blogger is that I enjoy the blogs of parents of learners with special needs, I really makes me connect to the other 18 hours a day of the five days of a school week, plus the weekends and vacations my students are not with me and it reminds me what is important.

Going on a dead link hunt is something I do twice a year, the end of June and winter break. I am running a broken link check as I type this and will work on weeding out the broken links over the Thanksgiving recess.

Promote a comment is the process of taking a comment and using it as a spring board to write a new post. Look forward to it in the next few days.

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Days 13-15

Alrighty then, half way through the 30 Day Challenge and I get off easy again! Here are the current challenges:

• find yourself
• greatest hits
  
• mobilize me

Really I am only getting off easily on 2/3. I check my Google and Technocrati listings about twice a month (find yourself) and because I have spent much of the past two years in an internet free school I frequently use my own blog via my Blackberry to get resources, so I know how my blog looks on a Smart Phone (mobilize me).

That middle one though, greatest hits, that's a tough one. What are my greatest hits? Certainly my compilation of free Boardmaker Boards (which will be much less important now that Adapted Learning is open) and, of course some of my other "list" posts (freebies, special needs software, mouting systems). Other than that could regular readers take a moment and mention what posts you would put in my top ten (or even top two)? Could new readers tell me what sent you here in the first place?

Thanks so much!

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Days 10 and 11

Decluttering the sidebar is complete. All of the individual resource lists have moved from the sidebar to individual blog posts and there are links to those from the sidebar. This makes the sidebar much shorter. A new list of the blogs I read has been added to the sidebar as well as the day 11 challenge, my e-mail address.

Have a great Saturday night!

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Days 11 and 12

The challenges are to declutter the blog roll and declutter the sidebars. Seen my blog lately? These are not exactly one day challenges. But here is a commitment that it will happen this weekend. Scouts honor. (And I am a serious scout, even went to college on a scouting scholarship and met first lady Barbara Bush because I was the youngest girl ever to earn a the girl scouting equivalent of the Eagle Scout. But I digress.)

I have, for now, eliminated the lists of resources that also have a link to their own page. There are a few lists I have not moved to their own posts yet and they are way down at the bottom of the sidebar. I will make them a home this weekend. I also used a tutorial to move the actual list of blogs I read daily (or as often as they come out) from Google Reader to my sidebar. It actually appears more cluttered to me because it is not alphabetized but in the order I subscribed to the blogs. That's all I can handle tonight though.

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Days 8, 9 and 10

I'm a bit behind with the 30 Days Challenges (IEPS and quarterlies will do that to you). Day eight was to comment on other peoples blogs, which I do frequently.

Day nine was to switch your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) - the feed that allows people to look at favorite blogs in a reader like Google Reader) to Feedburner. I am not a fan of Feedburner because it is a blogger first application, i.e. it puts the needs of the blogger (statistics) before the needs of the reader (in my case assessbility). Feedburner reformats blogs to met their standards, resizing images, moving images around, changing where the breaks are in writing, etc. I work hard to make my site more accessible and sometimes Feedburner undoes that. However in an effort to show an open mind and a commitment to the 30 Day challenge I have changed over to Feedburner for at least one month. Please comment whether you like it or not it if you regularly read this in a reader.

Day ten is to look at your blog in another browser. Ricky over at ATMac tells my everything look pretty good on the Mac browser (Safari). Things also seem to look good in IE8 beta and 7, though I was loathe to open them. I also checked things out on two accessible browsers, EdWeb and WWAAC, things were choppy in places, especially on Vista, but when I fired up my old XP machine (and firing that thing up is a loooong process) everything was overall ok. Finally I installed and checked things out on the Opera, Safari, Chrome and Flock browsers, not bad there either. In order to check out some other browsers I used BrowserShots, everything looks fine. Here are some screen shots of various browsers:

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Day 7

Today's challenge is to invite a guest blogger. I have had three guest blog posts here on TLWMSN, but I'd say I am up for the challenge of inviting another one. Stay tuned while I locate someone willing. Anyone interested? How about you AAC/AT/Special Needs Software company folks, care to write about something new coming to the market? How about a student teacher, want to write about how it is to start out in this field? How about a parent? Comment or e-mail if you are interested.

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Day 5 and 6

Two in one day (day five's challenge was posted after I went to bed last night, sidenote: I feel asleep with NBC streaming on my laptop and did not know who the new president was, I awoke in the middle of the night to screams and applause coming from the laptop and saw Michelle Obama leading her two girls across the stage before President Elect Obama began his acceptance speech).

Day 5 - Globalize your blog. I already use one of the suggestions, ClustrMap (see bottom right of the blog). Today we are also to add a translation service to our blog. With visitors from 103 countries and territories last month this seems useful, however Google's blog gadgets have a tendency to slow page load, so I will be watching carefully to see how useful the gadget is and is it slows thinks down.

Day 6 - Today's assignment is to get fresh perspective on your blog. I shared my blog with a class of nine paraprofessionals learning about behavior methodology in a class I taught today. I invite them all to comment and tell me what they think of this website.

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Day 4

Today's challenge is to create a Creative Commons License for your blog. I am choosing to license my blog as share-share alike (you can share my work as long as you credit me and my blog) and no commercial redistribution (you can't make money off my work). I have had numerous people ask to use my work in presentations and they have always been granted permission (as long as they credit me). Here is what the license looks like:


Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs Blog by Kate Ahern, M.S.Ed. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.teachinglearnerswithmultipleneeds.blogspot.com.

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Day 3

Today's challenge to be a better blogger is to write a thank you note. Established bloggers are to write a thank you note to someone who has linked to their blog. New bloggers are to write a thank you note to some one who inspired them to blog. I am thinking I qualify as an established blogger, thus I am posting here an open e-mail to the writers of the following blogs:

• Patrick Black at Teaching All Students
• Alicia at SMD Teacher

Dear Patrick and Alicia,

First of all a belated welcome to the small, but growing, world of special education blogging. I am writing my thank you note to you because you are joining me in using the power of the internet to provide resources to teachers, therapists and families of learners with special education needs. The speducation blogesphere is small, but it is mighty, and it is great to have you are new voices out there. Also thanks for linking to me.

Sincerely,

Kate

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Day 2

Day 2's theme is "play in traffic". This is pretty easy for me because although I have only been writing this site for two years I have been blogging for six or seven years and have always used a site statistic analyzer on my blogs. In order to make this a true challenge I will use a new statistic service, Google Analytics. I have been signed up with them for some time, but don't use it. Here are my October stats from them:

• 9,475
Visits

• 6,677
Absolute Unique Visitors

• 22,489
Pageviews

• 2.37
Average Pageviews

• 00:02:41
Time on Site

• 60.99%
Bounce Rate

• 66.09%
New Visits

Not bad. More visitors that last month, 1/3 of visitors are returning visitors, 39% look at more than one page (that is what the 61% bounce rate is) and the average visitor stays about three minutes. I haven't really learned anything I didn't already know, so let me dig a little deeper into the stats.

The browser stats tell me 65% of my visitors use Internet Explorer (come on people, time to switch to Firefox!), 25% use Firefox and the rest use one of nine other browsers (I didn't know there were nine other browsers! This tells me I need to be sure to periodically checkout how my blog looks in Internet Explorer so I can maximize the experience of those visitors.

Meanwhile 85% of my visitors use some flavor of Windows, 14% use a Mac and the rest use one of eight other browsers (flavors of Linux, iPod and iPhone and Blackberry to name a few). Thus I need to check in with some of my Mac users and make sure the site is working for them the way it should (feel free to comment and let me know).

Nearly all of my visitors have their browsers set up in English, but I have visitors with browsers set to six other languages as well. Additionally my visitors come from 103 countries and territories, but most are from the USA, Canada, the UK and Australia (no surprise there, given I write in English). Perhaps I need to spent more time writing about special education in other countries to make my blog as well rounded as my visitors.

Vistors to the site came from 306 different sources. Most visitors 60% come to the site after using a search engine, but quite a few come directly by typing in the address or using a bookmark. The rest come through other blogs, chat groups, listservs, social bookmarking and e-mail sites. (I have noticed a huge spike in visitors everytime someone posts my site to a listserv like QIAT or the Boardmaker Group.) One interesting fact - more visitors come through an image search than a text search. I guess I better keep posting lots of images.

So there you have it, I have playe din traffic!

30 Days to Being a Better Blogger - Day 1

Based on Teach42's suggestions for taking a month to improve your blogging I am starting off the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger challenge.

Day 1, Question 1 - Who am I?
Well, my name is Kate Ahern. I am a veteran teacher of learners with significant special needs. I live in New England and how a M.S. in intensive special education. I started this blog without putting my name or anything else about me on it (I was a bit gun shy from some negative blogging experience before this). Eventually I added my first name, later my picture and still later my last name. My address is only listed as New England. My place of employment is not listed anywhere (as this site is not sponsored, endorsed or in other way involved with my employers). I do have a list of my web 2.0 contacts from instant message and email addresses to microblogging and photosites. However, contrary to Teach42 suggestions I do not have a link to my "About Me" Blogger page and I don't plan to add one (one last shred of privacy, I guess.) Teach42 suggests a paragraph about yourself and perhaps you resume, but I will decline on that, two years of posting and I am fairly certain that it is obvious I am a special needs teacher.

Day 1, Question 2 - What is your blog about?
Suggested things to think about one this on include what are you trying to accomplish with your blog? Who are you writing it for? What kinds of articles do you try to post about and how is your perspective different than everybody else’s? Also suggested is looking back on your first dozen or so posts. I started this blog while out on worker's comp for a leg injury, at the time I was feeling very much disliked by most of my colleagues. It might have been some minor paranoia and it might have been true, but I think it is a little bit of both. My perception was that folks thought I was a nerd and know-it-all (a reputation I have had my entire life) so I decided if I blogged about what I knew it would let people come to me to find out what I know instead of me pushing it on people. Overall I think the blog as a way for me to "nerd-out" about intensive special education without being annoying has worked well, especially since some 9,000 people a month seem to come find out about something I know. So on a personal level this blog was for me to share what I know about teaching learners with intensive special needs.

First and foremost, I write this blog for other special education teachers, but I know I have all sorts of general and ESOL teachers who follow along, in addition to parents of learners with disabilities, those in teacher education and those in assisitive technology. I am thrilled that all these people find value in what I write, but my goal is always to help teachers of students with low incidence disabilities better do their jobs. People who know me well would say that, on occassion, I also use this blog to vent, but I hope even when I do that I back up my arguement with research and critical thinking so that it is benefical to others!

I post about everything that comes into play in a teacher of learners with multiple special needs day, from curriculum to scheduling to assisitive technology and more. I hope that my perspectives are different from others in that I research what I write in order to ensure that what I put out their is indeed best practice and that I focus on what is best for students, not what is cool, popular or new out there in the world.

So that is day one, look forward to 29 more days.