So procrastination has always been my strong suit. I went to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library with my son’s 5th grade class and bought a magnet with Lincoln’s quotation “Whatever you are be a good one.” School is out and I have somewhat caught up with the camp forms and other monstrosities that have awaited my summer self to emerge from the stacks of essays, and now I turn to the daunting task of the 31 Day Comment Challenge (which I have been keeping up with) and reflecting on what I have learned.

Day 1–Self Audit

The self-audit was very helpful–I realized that I read blogs, but rarely comment. I didn’t know how to track my comments, so I never actually saw if someone reacted to what I had commented on. I had recently started a class blog (in April) so I had been very busy commenting on my students’ blogs, but I rarely ventured out beyond those I knew.

Day 2–Comment on a New Blog

This one was easy because almost any blog I commented on was new. I commented on many blogs, clicking around and reading blogs that were cited in other blogs. Sometimes I got responses, sometimes I didn’t. I commented on some student blogs and did not receive any responses. That made me realize that I needed to explicitly tell my students that they needed to respond to each comment or the conversation might not ever happen. Some of my students did this naturally, but others definitely needed to be coaxed.

Day 3–Track Comments

This was perhaps the most helpful assignment. I didn’t know anything about cocomment and am very pleased to get to know its acquaintance. I’m still not certain why some comments appear several times and I’m not sure what the orange CO means and what the envelope means, but I click on them and can track my comments pretty easily. I became so dependent on it that when I changed my theme and cocomment didn’t work, I sent out an SOS. Amazingly, through eerie keywords I guess, cocomment and edublogs fixed the problem and now OceanSide now is compatible with cocomment.

Day 4–Ask A Question

I visited Christine Martell’s blog  about visual noise and was amazed by what I learned about the eye’s F pattern.  I don’t particularly like reading online, and  this post helped me  understand why.  I asked her if she would take a look at my blog and because of her feedback, I have changed the look and feel of both of my blogs.  Without the Challenge, I doubt  I would  have ever had the nerve to ask the question.