Twitter and blog lurking as resources.

I woke up this morning, had my daily cup of coffee, took a few deep breaths and let the morning unfold as I watched my daughter make beautiful music with a few of her favorite pots and pants. I put her down for her morning nap (as making beautiful music is exhausting....) and then went to my computer to catch up on emails, news, etc. Checking out my twitter page I noticed a post from a user I connected with during the #sciscat earlier this week. The tweet read: "Using glogster in the classroom:useful helpsheet and ideas" and was followed by a link. Since this was one of the tools I've been playing with this week, I thought I'd give it a look. The page I was sent to was a blog of a teacher that had used glogster in his classroom of 7th graders. A helpful "how to guide" was included in the write-up; this set of guidelines is definitely a clear and easy explanation of the tool for middle school students. I continued to "lurk" through his posts, which included a few opinion pieces as well as some write-ups on useful web tools, gadgets, and widgets (what the heck is the difference between a gadget and a widget anyway!?!?!) Anyhow, Russel Tarr's most recent post recommended a widget called Feedjit that could track all blog visits with quite a bit of detail. I want to play around with this widget a little more, but I was thinking that it might be a nice way to track views of a class blog. I just set it up on my own blog and see how it goes. Check it out in the bottom right corner of my blog. What do you think?