My blogging experience
Currently I do not use blogging in my classroom. As I am new at my work, I am in conversations with the principal in order to build more specific policies about IT integration in instruction.
But I had used bolgs in other school with students of grade 11. We held a space to support the traditional setting of instruction that was about news of the world. Students work through different news at different moments of the semester. It was a space for interaction between students and between students and me. There I posted deadlines, course materials, rubrics of evaluation. Students posted news and commentaries about the news posted by their peers. The platform that I used was Bligoo. It was suitable for me and my students because it functions as a group blog or social network. It had a messaging system were students and me could be in touch if any doubt about the news or class content appeared. Also I could manage my students’ membership role (authors, administrators, only post commentaries, etc.) and care for their security by having control of their interactions through the site.
Today I am planning to use edublogs for a course that I will hold in a graduate program. I will use this platform because it allows me to create courses in a free format (the university is not providing funding for purchasing a blog platform) and it functions also as a group blog. Its features are very similar to WordPress (which we have been using in this course and other MET courses), so it is easy to use and can promote students collaboration, ownership and construction of knowledge through the web. It is more professional than Bligoo and allows me to manage the membership role of my students.
Posted in: Week 07: Blogs
Juliana 1:56 pm on October 17, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Angela,
Thank you for sharing your experiences! You touch on some of the implementation issues people have to think about when starting a blog. Your application is unique in that you are creating a course in a blog. Any reasons why you are choosing to use a blog for this instead of an open source LMS such as Moodle? Also do you find that there are any limitations with Edublog?
Looking forward to your response!
Juliana.
Angela Novoa 4:55 pm on October 17, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Juliana, we will use Moodle and a wiki as part of the course. The course is about Web 2.0 tools for learning. I chose those three because they facilitate the creation of communities of learning.
bcourey 2:32 pm on October 17, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Angela,
I too used to use Edublogs – I appreciated that it was designed for educators, but then I became frustrated with the advertisements that suddenly appeared across the top of my blog – only by paying for the premium version would that stop. Maybe that has changed since then, but I switched to WordPress after that. One thing that I do appreciate about Edublogs though is the “awards” granted to the best blogs by educators – just like the awards that books win, ( I am attracted to the award-winners and assume they are good reads?) this is a good filtering system to help me wade through the thousands of teacher blogs out there!
I too am anxious to hear if you have tried Moodle as an open source LMS.
Angela Novoa 4:57 pm on October 17, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Brenda,
I have been designing the course for a month now and it haven’t appeared yet any advertisement. Hope not experience this, but thanks for the tip. I will be aware about that.
Thanks for the tip about awards. I did not know that we could do this.
Angela.
Deb Kim 2:35 pm on October 17, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Angela,
Just to let you know that your post should go into the Week 7 category:)
Deb
Angela Novoa 4:58 pm on October 17, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks Deb! Things like this happens when we are working a lot of hours 🙂
Deb Kim 6:01 pm on October 17, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Angela (again),
I’m currently using WordPress for three of my courses and two of them are Tech Immersion courses. I haven’t used Edublogs yet but I’d like to try it next year as you said functions and features are very similar.
Have you noticed any differences in terms of creating a blog? What are some of thr features in Edublogs that you think are cool?
Deb