Impressions on Karen Blumberg's live session at Spring Blog Festival 2015

By Marta Plaza

This online class, 'Our blogs, Ourselves', has made me aware of how many sites that we, as teachers, can use in order to develop a better professional career. 

She has introduced some tips to get started in all these websites, for instance, how our tweets and Facebook postings should be written (helpful, practical, generous, entertaining, informative…). 

I am already in the most famous ones such as Facebook, Instagram, twitter, Google+, but other ones I really looking forward to learning more about (Linked in, about me, ckr,…). 

I would like to start with Linked in that, as Karen has said to us all, it is a business- oriented social networking service, so it sounds rather interesting to really find a job opportunity. Also, I am curious of investigating more about https://tagboard.com/, a tool which uses hashtags to search for and collect public social media within seconds of being posted, from networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Another important part Karen has been talking in this online class is the value that our online contribution could have as some reciprocity will be received. It will make us accumulate new information and ideas for our teaching profession. Not being an egg was another essential point she has pointed out (everybody must have an authentic and natural photograph of ourselves on social sites).

Karen also gave us some meaningful hangtags of many different education topics such as #openedu (open education), #FF (Follow Friday. Make recommendations of who or what to follow on twitter), #earlyed (Early Childhood Education) and so forth. She advised us to join them as well as specific communities on Google+, where we can know new people to connect with although we may not participate at the beginning. She said that something interesting may always be found to see. Also, she encouraged us to subscribe to newsletter (PBS LearningMedia, School Library Journal…) and to look for online learning opportunities (Standford, Open Utoronto…)


It was such an extraordinary class about social networking services! 

My personal conclusion about all this online class is that I need to be more updated with technologies. 

I will keep reading Karen Blumberg´s blog http://karenblumberg.com/.