Skyping with a Blogger

Today we had an opportunity to talk to an expert Blogger. Laura Fleming, the Cherry Hill librarian has a blog that is read worldwide. We called her using Skype a program that allows people to talk face to face on the computer. We all remarked how it seemed like Mrs. Fleming was right there with us in the computer room even though she was all the way down Bogert Road in the Cherry Hill Library.

We learned many important blogging lessons from Mrs. Fleming. Most importantly, we learned that she blogs about what she is most passionate about, Education and Technology. She inspired all of us to dig deep inside ourselves to discover the passions that we want to share with the world. Mrs. Fleming gets visitors on her blog from all over the world. She is going to teach us how to use a widget on our blog to record where our blog visitors come from. Mrs. Fleming loves to hear from visitors to her blog and values the comments people make to her posts. Sometimes, she told us, people disagree with her and she does not mind at all. She said when someone disagrees with something she has posted it inspires a conversation because people "talk" back and forth in the comments and as long as disagreements are respectful and polite, she welcomes all to comment- negative and positive.

Mrs. Fleming waving to us from the Cherry Hill Library as we entered the computer room. Our excited faces as we walked in and saw her on the screen made her laugh! Skyping is lots of fun!

After our Skype conversation, we continued talking about blog comments. Mrs. Pintarelli and Mrs. Danahy each shared a post they wrote on their blogs. Mrs. Pintarelli made posters of each post and we practiced writing comments on post its.  As we read and discussed the post-it comments, we discovered that the posts we liked most were the ones that we thought could ignite a conversation. We also noticed some "trolls" in the bunch and we brainstormed ways the troll could rephrase the comment to sound more polite and respectful.

Comments to Mrs. Pintarelli's "Snapple" post

We thought this comment was a good example of something that could inspire a conversation. Blog comments are most effective when they can add to or start a conversation.

 

A troll among the comments! hmmm who would write that? Could it be our teachers trying to teach us a lesson? We brainstormed ways we could write that more positively. One idea was "I prefer water. In my opinion, too much caffeine can be harmful".