ETiC

Welcome to ETiCally Speaking. I've experimented with blogs before to try them out, but never really saw a need for one. However, as I studied for the Google Educator Level 1 and 2 tests and started preparing to apply to become Google Innovator I started posting to Twitter regularly for the first time and came to realize that it's nice to be able to write longer, perhaps slightly more coherent texts than those allowed in Twitter, and it also offers me a venue and a more specialized audience outside of Facebook. Another inspiration for blogging was the blogs I've been reading by Adam Hill and others. I may never achieve their level of quality, but it is a good professional goal, and those are always good to have.

Therefore, this blog will be where I write about my positive and negative experiences using Google Suite and other applications in my classroom. However, since technology and teaching are never very far apart for me, I will also write about my teaching.

Finally a little bit about the name for the blog, ETiCally Speaking. Many years ago I ran a forum called ETiC on the English side of NiftyServe (OK, many, many years ago). They had a very active Japanese side and were testing the waters on the English side. Eventually with the advent of the WWW both sides fell away.

ETiC stood for English Teachers in Conference, and it was a place for 10 to 15 teachers mainly to chat online once a week. We had visitors from Kanazawa, Tokyo, and Fukui and had lots of fun. I tried to use ETIC as the name for this blog, but someone has already taken it, even though it's dormant. ETiCally Speaking has a couple nice elements to it. ETiC sounds like "ethic" but also etic and emic refer to whether one has inside or outside status in a group. Having lived in Japan for 30 years I have a sense of both emic and etic, depending on the context.

So, hello Blogging world! I'm looking forward to learning with you!