‘I want to reflect on my practice but there are so many tools to use. What would you recommend?’ Many times I get asked this question. My response is, ‘ I cannot tell you that, you will need to work it out for yourself.’

Treat your blog like a house, one day you might have to shift and like house shifting there is a huge turmoil, work involved, archiving, sorting and basically getting rid of rubbish, reorganising and a general tidy up. In addition there is the thinking that the new space will be better organised with proper tagging etc.  I have been thinking about my original decision to use blogspot as my preferred choice on and off since 2012 when I began to see wordpress being used and I set up my wordpress account. I hesitated because blogspot is a google tool and Google is the king of the internet, correct? Umm no check out China where the majority of the worlds population live and google does not rule.

I began my blogging journey in May of 2009. Therefore this is my sixth year of blogging. I chose blogger because at that time I had attended a course about setting up blogs and blogspot was the tool used. Again I focussed on the tool and not the process.

My blogging journey has been a bit sporadic as I thought through the process of change. My reflective journey started with a whizz and a bang and then slowed right down as normal teacher life took over.  When I am unsure I find I shift back into what I know rather than tackle the challenge. However every so often I got back into the process with renewed vigour. 2014 was a good year for reflection. I reflected on average approximately one post every two weeks and I want to continue that journey.

Many questions come to mind as I think of changing my reflective tool such as:

• What about my stats?
• What about Google being the king of the internet?
• What about my stats?

With time comes wisdom and I realise, I really do not care about either. Choose the tool for the job and from what I have seen, wordpress is pretty flash. And maybe in another seven year I might need to shift again, who knows? We all know how quickly information gets buried.

This time last year I set up my personal domain using google sites as I wanted a space that curated all that I do. I am still struggling with how clunky Google sites are. I continued to persevere because we use GAFE at our school and I needed to know how to use sites because sites does integrate nicely with drive and I love drive. This time last year too, I had set up a google slides personally for my own information and again when I get asked, ‘Who else blogs? Can I see what this looks like?’ You can check out the curated links if you are interested in reading other kiwi educator blogs.

We are all on a visible journey and from experience I know the importance of leaving breadcrumbs of sharing. I have been looking seriously too at how educators track their learning. The educators who have been active online for a while and whose reflective work I seriously admire, I like the set up of many of the wordpress blogs and I still like many features of blogger.

2015 I am shifting folks. Rather than bring my posts with me, I have archive my past seven years using blogspot. and any interested readers looking for any past posts can visit them there.  My new space here on wordpress will begin too with the registered Teacher Criteria. I have always admired how Stephanie Thompson did that. Through discussion with Virginia Kung, I have been working through what my own system should look like and have set up a tagging system that works for me.

I might relent with some past popular posts and bring those over with me. I am definitely bringing some of the features I liked from blogger and will combine the two blogging tools for a more streamlined look. I will need a bit of time to understand all the tools and create the space I want. So do check back and give me feedback.

So which blogging tool do you use and why? If you are a wordpress blogger, which tools do you particularly like?

Update

Oh My. I managed to export my entire blog from Blogspot and imported it into WordPress. The whole site came over, including all the comments. In addition, the domain name purchase was so easy. All the hashtags imported as categories and I just need to reinput them as hashtags and identify a theme that works and I am in my new space.