Betty’s Bytes

As the Internet continues to expand exponentially and the school division demands more and more from us as educators to engage our students using technology, time becomes a more cherished gift. Can you research, interact, and blog too much? Do you spend too much time on myspace, Facebook, Twitter, or some other social site? Do you find it difficult to try to read just the sites that you have tagged for their interests? Is your mailbox filled to overflowing with interesting information? Do you have to keep a list of your blogs, your logins, and your passwords just to remember what you have agreed to maintain?

All of these questions came to mind this morning, as I logged onto the computer to update my personal blog and realized that I have too many blogs to maintain.  This blog Betty’s Bytes is important as it provides a venue for me to share some of the ordinary and extraordinary things that I learn with my co-workers and friends in education. My personal blog is my journal and vital to sharing my life with my family and a few close friends. Through the years I have created several technology in education blogs, and for some reason I am reluctant to delete them even though I do not use them any longer — they seem somehow to mark an historical trail of how I got to where I am today. I have also created a blog for my son’s friends, who were traveling the world with the musician Jack Johnson as his nannies, a blog for my high school class after a mini reunion in Rockbridge County, and a variety of VBCA CRS blogs, wikis, and podcasting sites such as the VBCA Student for podcasting and Do You Believe in Me for publishing student writings. All of the sites that I use are free except for one personal domain that I use for personal links and email. Now, I am blogging on yet another free site, the one provided by the school division for us to use for instruction; my site is Technology & the alternative student, a reflection on what I am doing at work.

I have too many blog and wiki sites, so my next job is to evaluate what is really important, what I must keep and maintain, what I must keep for historical purposes, and what must be deleted. The time has come where teachers will create and maintain their own blogs, so there is no need for me to have quite so many — although, as I reflect on what this is all about, I am reminded that I must maintain a blog and a wiki for training purposes, as well — so there are two more sites that I cannot delete just yet.