Thing # 3 Blog & Avatar

I had experimented with blogging a few years ago in a variety of fomats: wikispaces, pbwiki (now pbworks), ning and blogger. I had toyed with wetpaint, but never found it satisfactory. Blogger is actually pretty simple to use and I like simple - Who doesn't! The set up was as easy as I had remembered. I met the avatar challenge with some trepidation.......not sure why, just that I have this idiotwithimages stamp on my forehead. I'm not sure how it got there, but past experience justifies its presence at the front n' center of my being. I have been having issues with my machine so the toggling back & forth between pages for directions was a more than a little exasperating. Also, I was looking for a better likeness: bald, glasses, whitening facial hair, WILDCRAZY ties, earrings....I guess what I ended up with represents more wishful thinking than acceptance of the harsh realities of gettingolder aging. I can see that this avatar biz satisfies at least 2 concerns I have with student blogs - it allows for some degree of actual representation with a fair dose of creative expression AND it's not an actual photograph. I think this coupled with "stage" names would provide calm for web predator concerns. This easy process also makes me see beyond my "One Class Blog" approach to envision a class network of student blogs.