But a goal I have decided to set for 2014 is to be less worried about what I put into a blog post. I have worried that my posts have to say awesome and inspiring things. Few people actually open up my posts so I shouldn’t be worrying about such silly things.  This will be the first post of 2014 with stuff that you might find interesting – or you might not.

The first type of post I want to use this year is one I just made up – “Tabs I Have Open”. There are days that I wake up and open my laptop and I see 15 or 20 tabs open from the night before. Today would be one of those days. After closing a bunch of tabs I now have 15 tabs open. Twitter will always be open and so I shouldn’t count that one. And, of course, the tab for this post shouldn’t count. Then there’s the in-boxes for 2 of my GMail accounts, a Google spreadsheet I was working on, and my shared Google doc for the book I’m working on. So when the smoke clears, there are seven tabs open with things I haven’t read or want to re-read to pull out stuff.

Looking left to right, I have a post from Chris Lehmann’s Practical Theory on “We Still Need Arts Education.”  I clicked on this link because I really like Chris and I usually agree with whatever he writes about. But I also clicked on it because I’m still getting my head around incorporating the A into STEM education – giving us STEAM education.

Next up is KQED’s Mindshift blog post entitled “What’s Our Vision For the Future of Learning?” I always try to keep up with the Mindshift blog.

My third is Andrew Miller’s Personalized Learning Starts With Personal Relationships .  He’s a great guy, a fellow BIE National Faculty member and just writes really well. If you don’t already follow him on Twitter do that now with @betamiller  or look for him on #pblchat.

Fourth tab from the left? The Engaged Education blog’s post (by David Price) about “Why Are We So Divided on The Purpose of Education?” Can’t remember if I opened it before the KQED post or after but they are related and the KQED post mentions David Price’s book, Open.

The next tab leads us to the Apps in Education post from December 19th entitled Rolling the Dice With Teacher Professional Development.  I’m always a sucker for reading about ways to engage teachers in professional development.

The next to last tab made me laugh when I clicked on it to see what it was. It is a post from last July about using Snapchat on the iPhone and Android.  My wife, Sheila, has been experimenting with ways Snapchat might be used in the tourism world and we were making sure we had all of the ins and outs of this app. She loves sending Snapchat photos and videos to our daughter testing various features. Of course I like to stay on top of it because so many of our middle schoolers (my own son included) use this app all of the time.

Last tab is a post about using the Personal Hotspot on iOS7. I’ll be getting my first iPhone today and I wanted to know about whether it is worthwhile using that feature with my current data rates and if I would need to change anything with T-Mobile.

This is a very link-heavy post but you could see each of tabs I mentioned if you went to my Diigo account.  I don’t save everything I read there but for this post I made sure I had saved each of them so you could go to Diigo and check it out. I love Diigo for saving things I find interesting so I can quickly reference them later.

I’ll try to not write a Tabs I Have Open post more than once a month or so. But if I wake up and I see a bunch of great stuff in the tabs I’ve opened you can count on me whipping up a post. Of course in between posts check out my Diigo and you’ll see the good stuff I’ve book marked.