This assignment was actually pretty fun because I usually view blogs as a means to procrastinate but in this case I was doing the assignment! Blogs seem to be growing exponentially and it seems that everyone \u201chas a blog\u201d\u2026. Something they check consistently as part of a routine. For me, checking blogs has become something I do even before checking email. The option of RSS feeds make blogs even more accessible. On my Firefox toolbar, I have my favorites links, Delicious links and list of RSS feeds making these items \u201cmindless\u201d to access. I\u2019ll admit it, my first exposure to blogs was not through anything news related or education related, it was through gossip blogs like perezhilton.com, laineygossip.com etc. I then branched out into blogs of friends from university or even people that were only acquaintances. I used to feel a bit creepy getting the inside scoop on the lives of others but hey, if you blog, it\u2019s out there! I think that blogs are genuinely valuable tools that are here to stay. They are easy ways to connect people with common interests through dialogue that is often so honest, you feel as if you are having a conversation. I had a grade 5 student last year who has brain cancer and her mom blogs through caringbridge.com. I am still able to follow her though every round of chemo and every success and setback as if I never left her life. Furthermore, this blog started by a mom who just needed an outlet for her emotions, has received anonymous donations for her daughter and a paid job for mom writing for a publication for oncology parents.<\/p>\n
I have only briefly experimented myself with blogging. Having a blog served a purpose when I was traveling in Europe and wanted to communicate with a number of people but didn\u2019t want to send individual emails or blanket emails that felt rigid because they were trying to cover the interests of everyone from Granny to my 20 year old brother to my coworkers. I used travelpod.com and loved it for the ease of use and convenience of a \u201cone shot deal\u201d. I also liked that I wasn\u2019t forcing my witty commentary on peoples\u2019 email inboxes. For images, I actually uploaded to photobucket.com because it was the quickest and had a link on my blog to this site.<\/p>\n
The sites suggested with \u201cTop 100 Education Blogs\u201d had some great blogs that I had never seen. I especially like how these blogs can provide an outlet for anything education related, be it rants about hot topics, resources, suggestions or just a running commentary. From an educational standpoint, I can see blogs used many ways for teaching and learning with elementary students. Much has been written about blogs as a replacement for journals and with the emergence of ePortfolios as significant assessment and employment tools, blogs will only become more prevalent and more useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This assignment was actually pretty fun because I usually view blogs as a means to procrastinate but in this case I was doing the assignment! Blogs seem to be growing exponentially and it seems that everyone \u201chas a blog\u201d\u2026. Something they check consistently as part of a routine. For me, checking blogs has become something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3865],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e-learning-toolkit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/bronk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/bronk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/bronk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/bronk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/bronk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/bronk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/bronk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/bronk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/bronk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}