Crackle Glaze

This post is for all the ladies out there. I am sure by now that you know about the latest nail craze of crackle glaze. You get a crackled design over your nail varnish colour. It is cute, hot and fun. Even us, cardigan wearing, teachers have funky nails.

Here is a picture of my fabulous talons.

When I was subbing last week, all of the teachers and principal were mad about my nails! That school will defo remember me when they need a sub next!

You can buy Crackly Glaze in most good pharmacists for about EUR 4. The only reason that I am posting this is because it took me hours to get it right. As I am all about sharing the knowledge and saving time for my blog readers, I decided to share the ‘How To’.

It started with a Tweet

As a lot of you may know, I was lucky enough to be a student of Caren Kenney. She is one busy lady - the creator of a television series currently in pre-production with Warner Bros TV, co-author of the book Fake Alibis, guest blogger for writing.ie, screenwriting tutor with INKwell Writers' Workshops, and a freelance researcher, proofreader / editor to boot.

I loved studying with Caren. But do you want to know how I met her? It was my 3rd week on Twitter and her 2nd day! There I was tweeting a published writer and she tweeting me back. Out circle of friends grew, and as we tweeted, we shared links to our blogs and the blogs we liked. I learnt so much about teaching, writing and social media.

Show me the blog-ey

 

So, there I was, alone in the day time, eveyone at jobs and me a new teacher with no teaching job, no money for a hobby and a nagging feeling. I ignored the nagging feeling; I had been feeling this way forever. I just switched on the TV, but I could not bring myself to watch it.

That is it; I have had enough of passively consuming media, let's go all teacher-ly and try to create.

Nominating!

After my post earlier today, where I nominated people for an Edublogs Award, I was lucky enough to receive a lot of contact asking how one could go about nominating me. I could only explain in the platform of my blog!

So, if you would like to nominate me for an award, all you will need to is to write a post in your blog with the nomination.

You can decide on the category, it was pointed out to me that my post on dyslexia was a good one and the person in question wanted to nominate me in the Most influential blog post category.

So you could blog something like:

Edublogs Award

Today I would like to write a post about the Edublogs and my nomination.

• Most influential blog post - goest to Michelle Moloney King for her post about dyslexia here http://teachermoloneyking.com/2011/07/thinking-outside-box.html 

Then after you publish your blog post, you need to go to the Edublogs Award page and paste your blog post URL (web address) there. They say on the Edublogs Page that the nomination has to be published on a public page, like a; blog, school blog, on a forum etc.

Thanks everyone for all of the tweets, DM's, emails and even texts. Especially to the writers on Twitter, you guys are awesome!!

M

My Edublog Awards 2011 Nominations

 Here are my nominations for the Edublogs. To make your own nominations, click here.

■Best individual blog - Bernie Goldbach has been blogging forever, his blog has a lot of varied information and it really made me want to be a better blogger.

■Best individual tweeter - The one and only Fred Boss. He started #edchatie

■Best group blog - Irish Teachers

■Best new blog Pamela O'Brien started this blog after joining the #edchatie. It is well worth a read

■Best class blog - I just love this Ms Gil Martins Class Blog

 ■Best student blog - This is a great TY student blog by Caitriona.

■Best ed tech / resource sharing blog - These are the guys behinde the virtual classroom - MissionV

■Most influential blog post - We are given an insight to e-learning policy in Irish schools by Ddonal O Mahony. 

■Best twitter hashtag This has got to be #EdChatIe

■Best teacher blog Without a shadow of a doubt this has to go to Anseo.net.  

■Best librarian / library blog - Tipperary Libraries

■Best School Administrator blog - Clontuskert School.

■Best free web tool -  Class Dojo This helps you to manage behavior and boost engagement in class really quickly and easily. 

■Best open PD / unconference / webinar series - Gifted Kids

■Best educational use of a social network - Nigel Lane has all areas of social media covered.

■Lifetime achievement - Without this site, not one teacher could get through TP, Seomra Ranga - thank you!

                               “A man's errors are his portals of discovery.”  James Joyce

Hyper Text Markup LOVE

HTML is the language behind the fancy blogger GUI. You can change it to get more traffic! I love HTML. Today I will be talking about Meta Tags in HTML. (Oh blogger, you have made the www my classroom, and me; an eternal student!)

What is a Meta Tag and why should you care? They help your blog get traffic.  I once hear a blogger say that, 'talent is the most important thing.' Is it though? Is it really? How will I ever find your 'talent,' if I cannot find you on Google. Like, helllllooo!

  

Meta Tags help search engines to index your blog, thus leading traffic to your blog. They also offer you a way to control how your blog is described by some search engines. Did you know that if you don't have meta tags in your blog then a lot of search engines will not even see your blog?

If no one sees your blog then no one will come, no one will read your work and, no one (not even you) will care enough about you and your 'talent.'

But, if you HTML smart and blog cute...then who knows, maybe someone will like your 'talent' and HTML. They might like it so much that they will nominate you for an Irish Blog Award and you might even win the Best Newcomer, or the Best Blog Post, or God...maybe even the Best Blog. Back to HTML coding, bad blogger for getting distracted about dizzy heights!  (mmhh, I just Googled the IBA and have read that they will not be running in 2012. I wonder if there will be any Blog Awards??)

You can use description, title and keywords in your Meta Tags.

Keywords

Deciding on your keywords, ask yourself "if I was at a search engine and looking for a site on this topic what would I type into it to find this page?"

Some search engines will look at keywords in the blog post itself and if they see the same word in the body of the page and in the keywords then your placement in the search results will be higher. Higher = more hits. One thing you should never do is type the same word twice in your keywords. Search engines may get confused and not look further to your blog leading to your page getting missed.

Title

This tag makes words show up on the top of the browser but it also tells people what your site is about.  When I Googled my site (before I added in title Meta Tags), I was always greeted with a snippet of my latest post., now, it is a neat description!) In your title tag you should use a short phrase that describes your page and uses keywords.  

Description

It's worthwhile this tag for blog as you gain  part control with various crawlers. You are using this tag to expand on your title tag.

Go to design, edit HTML, do a 'ctrl  f ' for ''