Day: April 14, 2018

Blogging ideas


Working with Cameron Steltman’s Grade 5 class in Burlington was such an interesting experience.  I’m not sure whether the full discussion got to the voicEd show or not but there was an interesting question once Stephen Hurley let the class know that I’m a regular blogger.

How do you get ideas?

It was a long drive home and I started thinking about this.  As I mentioned to the student, I have a friend in Colleen Rose who is an amazing artist and photographer.  I mentioned to her once that she sees things that other people don’t.  I like to think that philosophy helps me with my passion, blogging.

READ LOTS

I have always done this.  I’ve always been an early riser and I devote an hour to my own quiet time reading.  I have a Flipboard with close to 200 different categories and a News 360 feed with about 50 categories.  Google News is a wonderful source as well.  In addition, RSS is not dead.  I use The Old Reader and moved all the sources from my Google Reader there.  Of course, I monitor Twitter and my Livebinder of Ontario Edubloggers as well.

CHALLENGE MYSELF

While my actual blog posts are what I like to think positive in nature, I don’t apologize for that.  I want to be seen as generally positive.  For my own purposes though, I do read from the Echo Chamber and I’m inspired because of it.  But, I also dig into stories that are a real challenge to read.  Like I tell my kids, it would be a pretty boring world if we all agreed on everything.  I like to think that the “other” stories gives me a balanced look at things.

SAVE STUFF

This is really important to me.  It’s one thing to read things and then promptly forget them.  In my case, I tuck everything away in a Flipboard document called “Readings”.  I do share a lot of what I’ve read through Twitter and, at the same time, IFTTT tucks them away in my Diigo account.  While some people use Pocket as a storage place, if there’s something that I know I want to blog about, I’ll store it in my Instapaper account.  If I’m not somewhere where I can save easily, I’ll use my phone or watch to put things into either OneNote or Keep and get back to them later.

I LISTEN TO PEOPLE

There’s no more powerful way to learn than to listen to people.  It’s very seldom that I find a person who doesn’t have a passion or interest and want to talk about it.  The talk can be face to face but we do live in a world where those conversations also take place online.  By choosing your friends wisely, you can have immediate feedback to a discussion.  I’m probably not going to take everything at face value but look at it as a launch pad to deeper thinking.

MOST OF ALL – BLOG

It’s a vicious circle.  The more I blog, the more I continue to blog.  The more I continue to blog, the more I learn, and the more I want to blog.  And, the more I blog, …

OTR Links 04/14/2018


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.