My name is Cynthia Peterson. After 38 years of teaching (23 as a teacher librarian in junior high and high school), I’ve retired — sort of. Through the University of Alberta’s Teacher-Librarianship by Distance Learning program, I am presently working on a M. Ed. in School Librarianship, something I’ve long wanted to do, but with home and work responsibilities, never had time for.

This blog is part of my classwork for EDES 501, Exploration of Web 2.0 for Teaching and Learning, taught by Joanne de Groot. Although I’ve created very simple blogs and wikis before, I am definitely lacking expertise with Web 2.0.

In his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Will Richardson zeroes in on what I’m lacking. He describes teachers who “have taken the work they had students do in the paper, analog world and simply digitized it” (p. 8). That probably describes about 75% of the work I’ve been collaborating on with my colleagues. Now I have the opportunity to use this blog as my tool to construct my own learning.  

I decided to use Edublogs for this blog, as it comes highly recommended by colleagues, and it is ad-free. As I hope to be using this with teachers and students, I want to be sure I am really familiar with it. I have already discovered that the instructions leave something to be desired! 

I felt quite sheepish when it took me four hours to figure out how to upload a Word document! I would have expected to be easy, given that this is designed for teachers to use with their students. I plan to create some Edublog tutorials of my own later.

I am also hoping that it will not generate the spam email I got when I used other programs.  I have found it rather “glitchy” but perhaps that is is my lack of expertise.

Here’s to new challenges!