I have recently found a blogging challenge that dates back to 2017, but I liked it so much that I wanted to start writing.
Summer is a "dead" period for me, so blogging keeps me focused and gives me a sense of purpose.
Well, I am not a new blogger.
I have started this page 12 years ago, when blogging was not that popular, especially in my country, Greece. Now I see lots of webinhars, seminars, presentations happening especially from people who have just started and it seems really funny to me that everyone presents themselves as experts. I know I am not, although I have been writing for 12 years now.
It was not clear to me back then if it was going to be a professional or a personal blog, so my first posts were a little bit of both. I had to experiment for some years and then I separated my personal thoughts to another page and I used my language (Greek) to write. My personal blog does not have so many followers and this is not its purpose anyway.
Writing about my students' projects and my ideas has helped me in many ways.
- First of all, there is an archive with everything I have done and I can easily find it again to use with another class.
- Secondly, this blog has helped me network. Not so much with clients, but it has helped me connect with other educators, exchanging ideas, talking about problems that we face and making new friends. Blogging challenges have played their part - my students and I have cooperated with students from around the world, learned about new cultures, experimented with new technologies and all this gave me a chance to present my work to conventions (online and face to face) and the networking goes on.
- This is also a kind of portfolio for potential clients (students) in order to get to know me and my work a bit more, which could also be called "advertising" - but as I said before, this is not the main reasin.
- Finally, blogging keeps me sane. It gives me a sense of purpose, especially in the summer, when I don't work. Since our job has to do with our mind, I am a person who has to keep the mind occupied. I cannot rest for more that 4 days, so the teacher's long holiday does more harm than good in my case.
Of course nowadays, things have moved on. Blogs are more technlologically advanced, more apps, more animations, some people don't write anymore and have "evolved" this into vlogging or Instagram. I have accounts in most social media, Instagram is a representation of my personal and not my professional life (which is good, since I am not only a teacher and to tell the truth, since I don't sell something, I don't believe that I could become a "teacher -influencer" on Instagram. This media suits more to make-up artists or models in my opinion.). I would like to try vlogging, though starting from my personal blog in my mother tongue first. We'll see how it goes.
How is your Blog Story?