A New Blog for Catholic School Teachers

Today marks the launch of Catholic School Chronicles, a new blog for Catholic school teachers. If you're a Catholic school teacher, please visit the site and subscribe to the RSS feed, and if you know any Catholic school teachers, please let them know about the site. Thanks.

More on Blogorator

A couple of days ago I wrote about Blogorator, a widget that allows visitors to rate your blog. The good news is that as of this writing I'm the highest rated education blog on the Blogorator site (with only 4 ratings, and one of them mine, so I'm not breaking out any champagne). The bad news? Apparently the widget may be causing an error message to pop up in blog readers and on the page itself. I've only heard one comment about this so far, and I haven't been able to get the message to pop up myself, so if you're experiencing this, would you mind letting me know? If it's causing a pop-up, I will remove the widget immediately.

How Does Your Blog Rate?

Michael Kwan at JohnChow.com has a nice sponsored review of Blogorator.com, which provides free rating widgets for blogs. The sign-up is easy, the code-generator works like a charm, and the blog rating widget looks pretty decent (see my Blogorator in the right column). Rating a blog is similar to rating a product on Amazon.com. You just click the star, and voila! the blog is rated. If you're registered user of Blogorator and you've uploaded an avatar, your avatar gets displayed as well. Your blog also gets ranked at the Blogorator site, so there's potential for more exposure. As Kwan points out, there are no minimum votes required to be at the top, which needs to be addressed. One feature I wish it had is the ability for each post to be ranked and factored into the rating. Still, Blogorator seems like a pretty cool idea. I'll try it for a while to see if I really like it. If you install Blogorator on your blog, leave a comment and I'll visit your site and rate it.

Announcing Teen Literacy Tips

I am very pleased to announce the launch of my major web project, Teen Literacy Tips. If you are a junior or senior high teacher or administrator, a homeschooling parent, or a parent who wants to enrich your teen's classroom education, Teen Literacy Tips is designed for you. Please tell as many people as you can about it. Here's an excerpt from the introductory page: This site will help you turn each of your students into the elusive Literate Teenager -- spontaneous yet intelligent, energetic yet thoughtful, the despair of nutritionists and the hope of the world. If you're a junior or senior high teacher, a concerned parent, or a school administrator, the materials you find here will help you teach teens to be more human, to be more intelligent, and to be more analytical. Using the skills and resources on this site, you'll become the reading mentor students need: the Gandalf to their Frodo, the Good Witch to their Dorothy, the Socrates to their Plato. The heart of this site is Teen Literacy Tips, an educational blog that provides you with teaching techniques and advice several times a week. You can subscribe to the feed using a blog reader, or you can simply bookmark the page and visit it each day. The discussion forums give you a chance to connect with other teachers and parents who face the same challenges you do when it comes to teaching teens to improve their reading habits and skills. And one of the most exciting areas is the resources section, where you will find lessons, book lists, articles, and much more, including audio and video files that you can download. This area will be expanding greatly during the coming months, so be sure to visit it frequently. I've even partnered with Simply Hired to provide job listings for those of you that might be fresh out of college and looking for work, or for those of you looking for a change of scene. Please drop by and leave a comment, and if you like what you see, spread the word. You can find it at www.TeenLiteracy.com or www.NickSenger.com.

The Ultimate Blook Guide: Blogging Your Book

One of the great things about joining a group writing project is that you discover some other good bloggers and blog posts, like Novlr.com's Ultimate Blook Guide: Blogging Your Book. Whether you're currently writing a book or just thinking about it, you might find Novlr.com's ideas helpful. Topics include: Choosing a blogging platform Set it up Optimize Copyright Write! Promote Publish

New to My World

Blogs and websites of note from the past few weeks: Julie D's Happy Catholic Blog is an award-winning blog with an awesome tag line: "Not always happy, but always happy to be Catholic." Robert Fielding has a great blog called Imaginary Conversations where he engages writers and thinkers from the past in a fictional dialogue with himself to explore their ideas. Here's a useful site for Catholic book-lovers: the Pope St. Nicholas V Yahoo! Group. Their mission: "to help Catholics make purchasing suggestions to their public libraries." What a great idea! Jean's Catholic Fire blog has been nominated for Best Religion Blog, and with good reason. The Sci Fi Catholic: "Science Fiction News, Book and Movie Reviews, Religions Topics, All from a Catholic Perspective"