Hi All,
At first, creating and designing my blog seemed tough, although the You Tube clips ‘Plain English’ assisted during my process. A blog is an online, website that individuals build by creating regular blog entries on particular news or comments about a specific topic. Readers and other bloggers make comments about this specific news and usually certain blogs and followed by other bloggers with the same interests. www.blogger.com is a user friendly site that allows bloggers to modify and design their individual blogs. I feel blogging would be educationally successful when incorporated into the middle/upper year’s classrooms. I am currently in a year one classroom and students still need full support with typing, turning the computer on and navigating their way around the desktop, however, with the older students this online tool is very engaging and could be used as an assessment task for students. Students could build blogs around ‘Australian Animals’ or ‘Out of Space’. I feel that using blogs and wikis will assist in my future as a learning manager as I will be able to confidently use these both in the classroom, with staff and parents. In my future I will create a wiki or a blog so that parents can stay up-to-date with what is happening in the classroom.
A Wiki is a great idea as it is a webpage (similar to a blog) that focuses on one topic or idea. It was again, user friendly, and allowed me to set it my individual page up in three easy steps. A wiki is an open source collaborative server technology that enables users to access, browse, and edit hypertext pages in a real-time context. Bo & Ward (2001); retrieved from The Wiki way: quick collaboration on the Web on 10/07/2010. This indicates that a wiki could be highly useful in the classroom setting, however being an open server allows anything from the world, wide web to make its way onto the wiki. I feel as though a wiki, could be beneficial in the older years, however as a teacher you must be on top of the site and discover correct and incorrect information. As students are becoming more technologically savvy, the wiki is a great tool use when learning about one topic or subject where students can add similar websites, images and digital tools on the site.
Hi Renee,
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree! I would definitely affirm that "blogger.com" is a easy to use program for creating a Blog, as I found it straight forward and simple to navigate. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post about Blogging, and I think your idea about using Blogs as a medium for assessment and checks for learning within the classroom would be engaging and effective. I think the students would find it fun to have ownership over their own Blog, and be able to make friends, communicate online and experience all the features of Blogging!
Personally, I see so many advantages of Blogging in students' schooling, as they are able to work collaboratively, and share their ideas and reflections with other people, and online; which, let's face it, is the way society is developing!
Thanks Kate!
ReplyDeleteAfter looking more into blogs I have found that there are so many advatanges with using them. With such a big push for ICT's in the classroom I now feel blogs are a good start for students as they could all blog to each other about topics, contents of work and ideas or questions about in class subjects. I have never seen a blog being used before (besides now) and I am starting to really get the hang of it. I hope when I have my own class in the years to come, that I can incorporate a blogging task for my students. Have you got any other ideas for blogs in the classroom?
Bye for now.