My journey begins

Over the past two weeks I have invested a great deal of time and energy to 'feeling out' the waters of online writing. There is a huge potential to do what I enjoy and share it online in a fairly straightforward manner. Over the past 16 days I have managed to expand this writing venture into several spreading directions. This blog is now connected to blogger.com, blogtopsites.com and blogged.com. In addition, the School Board I work for has posted this blog as a link on their new social networking site (www.scdsbnetworkedlearning.com). I have sent emails to friends to let them know and posted links on my Facebook page to this blog. In short, I have put myself out there and am eager to see where this all could lead...

My latest venture began yesterday. I started a "Fan Page" for my blog, "Ignite. Incite. Inspire." attached to my Facebook account. I am still in the process of figuring out how to actually suggest this page to my friends so that they can have easier access to what I am writing. I have tried this twice, but no page suggestions seem to be going out to my friends yet. Also, when I signed up for a "blogtopsites.com" account there was an option to connect to my Facebook account (which I took advantage of). What this means is that my blog posts here are automatically sent as a feed and posted on my Facebook Wall. People can now read my posts without having to navigate to another website (if they don't want to). In the process of adding this Facebook stuff I came across an online writing community that allows people to post articles on their site and have advertisement revenue directed back to them as a royalty. My application was approved by an editor and today I sent my first article to the "Education" editor to be posted (hopefully tomorrow sometime). If you want to read what I am writing on this site the address is http://suite101.com. I will post a link on this blog page in the sidebar to easily access these posts too. To me, this website is a more structured and serious writing opportunity to voice my opinions on things teaching and beyond.

Who knows what could happen here? I guess the message is to put everything behind a goal. I have the goal to post to this blog everyday - and so far have been successful. I would like to consider more serious writing opportunities and am thinking about entering a writing contest through "The New Quarterly Online (http://www.tnq.ca). In the end, I would like to believe that I tested the waters and will come out of it with something gained. I love teaching and this would add a love of writing about a topic that I have (and continue to ) experience daily as an educator. This post adheres to advice that a former leader gave me in the fall, "Be transparent. People will respect you for it and always know where you stand." This is all sides of me and writing in a so-far 16-day relationship.