Welcome to my new, purpose-filled diary!

Pookie the pooch

Two months ago, my fiancé finally arrived after being away for most of the year, Christmas happened, my wedding happened, I moved out of the state, New Years happened, I moved into a new house with my new husband and tried to settle in. Finally, here I am. It has taken this long to get my name changed (with my husband's African name, our marriage certificate was a mess, making the process just a bit longer) and get approved to start work in a new state. I'm missing my puppy so much I'm taking him for walks in my dreams. Now I shall endeavour to find work as a casual teacher in this city which is now home. Stick around for long enough and you'll  probably hear about the joys I experience moving state yet again in September/October. So this is your update on my recent life - lots of changes and growth!

So why have I started a blog? Let me start my answer with a story...
In my first year of uni, I added another education student on Facebook for a collaborative project. As a result, I was scrolling through my newsfeed when I noticed a pornographic photo on my wall. Shock horror! This girl had submitted a photo to a magazine and someone she knew had spotted it, uploaded it and tagged her. This is not something a teacher wants online (or anywhere) while trying to apply for jobs. Worse still, I imagined a parent or student googling her out of curiosity. As a teacher, online identity can be incredibly important, especially in this age of ICT smart children!

While reading an article about online identity, I decided to google myself with my new name. My old name was shared with a few other randoms unless I threw in my middle name (thank you mum and dad for getting all sentimental and using my Oma's name), but it seems this new name is all mine to form online as I wish (thank you hubbie for being African)! Then I read this post from workcoachcafe.com to learn about building up my online identity. One of the suggestions was to create a blog, which would open my professional beliefs, skills and knowledge for the world to see and judge as they will. While I have no porn photos to try and hide away in page 10 of a web search, I figure there's no harm in boosting the good, honest information available about me on the internet. So here I am.

As I am not one to go into things blindly, I continued to read and stumbled across 15 Reasons I Think You Should Blog. Two of these reasons include improving communication skills and improving thinking skills through reflection. Now if my self-reflection improves my teaching, I can do that anywhere, as I have in the past, but making it public also opens my thoughts up for other's to possibly learn, comment and build on my thoughts. I love the idea of pursuing life-long learning and improving practice whenever possible, whether for me or someone else, so I'm thinking I'd be a fool not to try!

So with my head barely out of wedding planning mode, now I'm thinking:
Something bold,
Something new,
Something borrowed,
Something true...

Care to join me on my adventures?