I’ve been exploring seven things today, and I thought you might be interested. They are a blog, another blog, another blog and yet another blog, a new service from Voki, a book, and photography.

The first blog

I came across this article somehow: 11 things I have learned from writing ebooks. I found it pretty interesting. As you may know, I have an interest in self-publishing (see, for example, 4 Reasons to get published, and 7 reasons to self-publish).

That post was by Nikki Pilkington, who has her own blog…

The second blog

Nikki has her own website and blog, which has lots of information and suggestions about search engine optimisation, social media marketing and related ideas. I’ve read a couple of her blog posts and found them to be both enjoyable and informative. Nikki’s original article was on a blog called “Birds on the Blog”.

The third blog

For the erudition of non-Brits, the word “bird” in Britain denotes a fanciable woman. So, Birds on the Blog is a women-only business blog. I don’t usually like things like that in principle, but there’s a good variety of posts which I’ve started reading and which look I forward to exploring further. Wandering around that led me to discover “Blokes on the Blog”…

The fourth blog

OK, a quick language lesson again. The word “bloke” in England means “fellow”, and is used informally. You wouldn’t say, “Come on, blokes”; but you would say “I said to this bloke…”. Anyway, Blokes on the Blog is the male response to Birds on the Blog. Again, this looks worth exploring, because of the variety of “voices” as well as the diversity of subject matter.

Voki

I’ve started to explore a new service called Voki Classroom. You can see the full list of features on the Voki website, but in essence it enables you to create student environments with lesson plans and automatically-generated student logins.

The book

The book I’ve been exploring, as I mentioned recently, is Problogger’s Guide to Blogging for your Business. Look out for a review in the forthcoming edition of Computers in Classrooms, the free e-newsletter for anyone with a professional interest in educational ICT.

Photography

Today, after much dithering, the heavens opened, so I sought to capture it. Unfortunately, neither two different digital cameras nor a video camera yielded anything dramatic. However, on reviewing the video footage I discovered this rather nice frame. Just another English summer's day...It reminds me of a watercolour painting. It goes to show that by exploring your photos or videos in a slightly different way – asking if there is a screenshot you could usefully take, or a great section of a photo rather than the whole thing – you can find a gem. A definitely good tip to pass on to your students I think!