I reviewed the blog "Lisa Nielsen: The Innovation Educator" and for the most part I thought it was a fantastic blog! There were so many features that I absolutely loved about it. One fantastic part was the "you may also like" link section. Her blog has hundreds of posts on it, which is great. but filtering through all of that is a little much and time consuming. With this feature it helps narrow it down. You

may read an article about a topic you're interested in and find the next topic right there in the row without even having to search for it. This also opens the possibility to new topics. When searching the website you can tend to narrow your search by using key words, where this may be able to suggest an article that is relevant but beyond what you put in the search bar.
     Another feature I found fantastic was the "Categories" section. It's just a sidebar feature that categorizes all of the different issues from homeschooling to ADD to facebook in the classrooms. I think this tool in incredibly effective because you can go into the blog not even knowing what to look

for and come out learning something. If you look in the image to the right, you can see all the different categories available. It covers many different issues we see in different classrooms. Especially for new teachers, or teachers new to technology this is helpful since they might not know where to start, and this offers some guidance.
     One thing I noticed was some of the topics have very strong opinions leaning one way. For example, in the SmartBoards category, her posts and her guest posts seem very, very against SmartBoards. They did not have very good things to say about this form of technology. I know this is a blog of personal opinions and experience, but I think part of being a teacher is making the best of what you have and excelling from that. In some districts they don't have access to much technology and would glad to have a SmartBoard. It just seemed a little intense to rule them out if the point of the blog is to help teachers in the classroom. It didn't happen a lot in the blog and most of the information was very good, but I did notice some negative posts.

Website Evaluation

The website evaluation was helpful in a sense, but I don't think I had that good of a website. I picked a website that was listed and it was a website full of short stories about ghosts and other haunted items. It was an interesting website but it wasn't the most established. It wasn't published by a legitimate publisher and most of the stories were submitted by readers. For what it is, it was very good, but it's not necessarily the most useful for a classroom setting. Actually evaluating the website was really easy for me, but I don't think I learned that much. Since there wasn't much established information, it was just a little FAQ section, I didn't really have to delve into the website. It answered most of my questions in the FAQ and gave me lots of questions on what was a legitimate, not that it was ever going to be a reliable source or anything. I wasn't sure if the website who published the stories were considered publishers or not. It lied on a fine line of not a personal website, but not really an established website either. I knew when I looked at it that it wasn't going to be the most reliable teaching website, but I figured I could evaluate and look at what not to do. Overall, the website evaluation was helpful even though I didn't have the best website because I at least got a sense of what to look for when making or reading a website.

Course Expectations

My course expectations are just to learn a lot! I know basic information about computers, so most stuff is new to me. I want to be able to really learn a lot about my computer and relate it back to the classroom. Being able to be the most efficient in my room is what's most important, so learning anything to help that will be very much appreciated! Learning how to work websites is a big thing for me. I can make it look pretty and design things in my mind, but I have a problem executing it on the actual computer.