And We're Back!

I probably really need a new blog, or at the very least a redesign, since I haven't been here in a year. But I don't see that happening this morning, so I shall merely proceed.

They say people have stopped blogging due to the expediency of status updates on sites like Facebook and Twitter. It is possible this has happened to me. I tweet a lot. Look to your right and we'll see if the widget is working. But lately, I keep having thoughts that are longer than 140 characters. I need a place to put them because I haven't been putting them anywhere. I used to love to blog. So I shall return to it.

Re-branding to follow when I have some energy/time... or just a more focused desire to rid myself of brain crack. (Further explanations of Brain Crack, and my quest to defeat it, can be found here, and here. We can definitely talk about that later.)

Today, I just need this blog back so I can link to a list of Webcomics to share with teens from my post over at the YALSA blog (where I do blog, about once a month). So I'm gonna do that and then we can talk about other things, like how my ambition to be a teen librarian has made me better at integrating technology into an elementary school curriculum, later.

Sample Blog Post

Up there in orange is the title.  Down here is the body of the post (we call individual selections blog "posts").  I can imagine all kinds of content here, a teacher posting assignments for his students to check in with at home and leave their questions in the comments section.  Student journals on everything from biology labs with labeled diagrams to maps and descriptions of civil war battles to biographies of famous people or somewhat less famous pets:

There are also plenty of uses for blogs in the library: Book reviews, announcing new arrivals, publicizing library programs, making pathfinders for specific projects, tech support:

or sharing a little book related humor with your students:

video by The Fifth District

Throughout this post you'll have noticed the hyperlinks, which take you to other sites when you click them.  This is an easy way to reference other websites in your blog post.  Sometimes blog posts are simply a collection of links that may or may not have commentary.  A library pathfinder might look something like that, or a student's virtual notes for a research project.

A few last things: 

• you can change text color
  
• use different fonts
  
• or styles
  
• use bullets
  
• or make a numbered list

And if you look below you can add tags to categorize your post and help you find it later.

I hope you enjoyed this little demonstration, classmates, now, everyone else, back to your regularly (intermittently?) scheduled blogging.