Day 1 and Day 2 blogging

I’ve discovered blogs are pretty cool in the classroom. I’ve used them in a few different ways but I have yet to use a blog in a way that I actually want to – as portfolios for students, but I digress. I’ve used blogs as places to store my own course material. I did not have a desk for a while so I used the blog to store all of my handouts/tests/marks etc. (a private one of course) and later I used one for a place to store information for my students to access (the course outline, updates on what we are doing/extra practice/homework assignments etc.). I’ve also used a blog to make a webquest where students could comment.  I’ve enjoyed using them and feel that they are an excellent opportunity for working together.

I have used blogger, weebly and wordpress and I found wordpress to be my favourite because of all of the options and it is very userfriendly.  I found blogger to be simple but it did not have everything I was looking for.  Weebly was too prescribed. I felt that I couldn’t do everything I wanted there. From the list of blogs that this group provided I’d like to try out Tumblr.  It seems user-friendly and I like the graphics (I know I shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover but . . . ).  The platform I don’t think I’ll use is loudblog.  It looks too complicated with too much writing. I feel like it would take me too long to figure it out.

 

From a critical standpoint blogs are a great venture as they provide for the collaborative part of a constructivist curriculum.  One instance when I used a blog to ask question about a reading students felt like they got the easy answer because they could see the answers of others but I could see that the majority of them really took the time to critically think about what the others were saying before they answered. I felt like it provided them with more meaningful learning as they thought longer and harder about the topic than they would have if they hadn’t been able to blog with others about it.

Posted in: Week 07: Blogs