Hey guys! Sorry I haven’t been able to make a new post for a long time. School has started here, and I’ve gotten really busy. I’ll get back to you world when I finally find some free time! For now, you can enjoy reading some of my school projects (but trust me, they’re as boring as school) in my PLWS (Personal Learning Website, it’s a project my school’s holding that encourages learning with technology), but even that I don’t update as often. Cheers! I hope to be able to write something soon.

Oh and before I forget, I recently made a site for my school’s publication. Please take sometime and check it out! I would love some feedback on the design. Link to it is here. http://xavierstallion.tk/

While most of you living in the other side of the world just started your vacation, here in the Philippines, we just started school. *sigh* I know right! Well, summer vacation had to end some day. Although, I am not too sad about this school year. As it turns out, my school is implementing a lot of things that will help make studying easier, with the help of modern technology! How osom (awesome) is that!

I’ve only been in school for… what… 4 days, so I am not too sure about what’s happening so far. From a talk of our school director, we’ve been informed of this whole forming us for the 21th Century gig. For example, instead of giving *ahemboringahem* lectures in class, selected classes are to use technology to find information for themselves. One of my teacher even pointed it out to the point that he’d have to do less work, while we will have to do more (yay?). Well, sounds interesting. A lot of work though, but interesting.

For my English class, we’re being introduced to blogging. Nothing new to me, but new to a lot of my classmates. I’ve always wanted to promote teen blogging (as I said in this post). So I’d gladly introduce to you my blog for my English class, English in Plain English! Hooray for the awesome title! So far, I have no idea what our teacher plans to do with it, but I’m guessing it’s where we’ll be posting a bunch of our writing essays. I know it sounds boring, and might not be interesting to read at all, but don’t worry, I’ll try to make it entertaining as possible.

Well pretty much that’s it. I’ll update you guys soon once I get to learn more about what else is new. One thing I know, is that I will enjoy learning side-by-side with modern technology bringing learning to the 21th century.

Hey everybody! Lately, I started learning PHP, and out of boredom, I came up with this neat idea for this extreme minimalistic homepage, and thus the birth of FocusTask.

FocusTask is aimed to help you do one thing, and that is to focus on that one, and only one, task you must fulfill! (more about FocusTask here.) No registration, no JavaScript, no Flash and best of all, it’s free for you to use! I also don’t collect data. Don’t worry. Anything you input there is stored in your computer, and is none of my business (or reach) to read.

Currently, I’ve tried it on Firefox, Chrome, and on some of my friends (I know that sounds wrong, but get the picture), and the app seems to be perfectly fine! I just got a bit lazy at the moment to decorate it, but if I get good feedback about it, then the full blown work is on!

If you like the app, pass the link to your friends! If I get the budget to, maybe I could buy a domain for it… Who knows!? hahahahaha!

Hey everybody.

I hope you like the new design! The old black and white one had good feedback, but after a month, I sort off imagined how it would look like if it was colored. I went with my favorite color, green, and started to build a new site on that foundation.

You may have also noticed those huge buttons at the side, well, those were just something I was working on in Photoshop. Actually, I was thinking of even making a tutorial on how I made those buttons.

If you have any other comments on the new design, don’t hesitate to comment.

~Dodie

It was around the time I first started this blog when one of my friends came up to me and asked me: “What inspires you to write?” He actually raised a valid question. It is uncommon for people to enjoy writing, more so for no reward but for the fact that you are sharing information. Well, unlike most people, I enjoy sharing information. Plus, as a teenager, I benefit from blogging.

Writing is an essential tool now a days. It’s a great medium to spread information. With the power of your words, you can make a difference. So what makes blogging so beautiful especially for teenagers? It’s a simple, modern, and chic way to practice your writing, and get actual feedback from people. Most teens are just stuck in school. Most of the time, the most exposure a student’s writing can get is through the school paper. We must learn to go beyond that and actually see how effective we can write to the public media.

School is only a fraction of the world we live in. In the future, we’d be out of there, and actually put the learning into the real life test. When writing for school, your audience is only less then a fraction of the world. Your blog can bring your words miles away. Many people will read your writings, and you’d most probably receive feedback from a variety of people. Feedback is a good thing. It helps you improve on your writing, or in some cases, it will help motivate you to write more.

There are many types of blogs out there. Some blogs may be as personal like the Diary of Anne Frank, or it can be a site to read the latest cellphones being released. Learn to play your expertise. Find that certain something you could excel at, and show it to the world. For example, I like Mac and all things Mac, so I write about interesting apps I found that I use for my Mac. I have a friend around my age, so he’s also a student, who loves playing basketball, so he has a sports blog. If you are an artist? Well then, blogging can be a great way to show your works and write about them. You don’t need to be a techy sorta guy to blog, all you need is a message you want to shout out to the world. The words you write, most likely or not, someone will read it, and that someone will learn from you. Just because you’re young, doesn’t mean you can’t blog. I’m not an expert on Macs, but I still write about it anyways, and I believe what I wrote, someone actually read and took in. In a way, I taught that person something, and that my friend is another great reason why teenagers should blog.

Here’s a little thing I learned in my creative writing class. There are six steps in the writing process. P-O-W-E-R-S. Pre-writing. Organizing. Writing. Editing. Revising. And lastly, one of the most important one, Sharing. And really, I must say, a blog is one of the simplest and easiest way you can share your writing.

So to make a short summary if you’re lazy to read the paragraphs above, here’s an outline of why students must learn to blog.

• Receive feedback outside school and home.
• Easiest way to spread your word.
• You get that warm fuzzy feeling in you that you know your words told a message to somebody.
• You practice writing, and you improve on your writing skills.
• Sharing is an important part of writing.

So what are you waiting for? Why not start up your own blog today! After all, there are a lot of free and simple blogging platforms out there. Some examples of those could be WordPress, Blogspot (aka Blogger), LiveJournal and to a certain extent, tumblr. You’d be amazed by how easy it is to put up a beautiful blog site with any of the tools listed above.

Before I end, to answer my friend’s question “What inspires you to write?” My answer would be “I am writer doing my job. Plus, I was inspired by reading tons of blogs.” I hope I have inspired you to blog.