What I Learned...

If I had to sum up what I discovered while reading teacher blogs, and really, other blogs, is that blogging isn't always easy. Its hard to keep it fresh and interesting. If you do not post often, people won't read your blog. In fact, they make become actively annoyed if it isn't updated regularly.
I see the lack of updating often on other Red Cross chapter blogs, and when we started blogging for the chapter, I had to promise our Chapter Exec that we would have at least one post per week. In the beginning, it was a struggle... My partner and I have a list of "back up blogs" should there be a week when nothing is happening at the chapter. The topics are like our very first blog post which was an "interview" with the chapter and include ideas like favorite disaster books or movies, disaster foods, etc. The same is true of Twitter: I try very hard to tweet at least one update daily from the chapter's account.
Last week, we used mobile Read/Write Web tools to post about our trip to Kings Dominion. Every hour or so, I used TwitPic to send a picture taken with my cell phone's camera... the links to the photos were posted to Twitter & our Facebook status. I was truly surprised at the number of comments we received when I got home later. People really wanted to see this stuff!!!
I must admit that I'm having trouble coming up with a specific unit, mostly because I know that I can't blog with my students... I'm thinking about doing something with community service/service learning, maybe. I know I want to encourage writing, but beyond that? I don't know.