I have to confess to being a closet blogger. That is, I personally have used blogs to organize and collect things I’ve done and learned online, but I admit to not using them that often in my classes. My first blog was created using Blogger in 2009, but its lack of ability to make pages […]
Continue reading Creepy blogger! Posted in: Week 07: Blogs
My name is Brenda Courey and I live in the southern part of Ontario – quite far south actually as you can see from the map. This course will be my 7th and my goal is to complete the program by the end of next summer (keeping my fingers crossed that […]
Continue reading Greetings from Ontario! Posted in: Week 01: Introductions
Hi Brenda,
I hope I can follow your timeline to finish next spring, this being my 7th course, as well. I have yet to attempt 2 courses at once, unlike many other MET students, and hence doubt my ability to remember all the things I have learned since I started in September 2009. ETEC 590 may well prove to be a challenge!
Best of luck on your continuing journey!
KJ
Hi Brenda,
I just finished ETEC 565 as well, and it was a good technical stretch, wasn’t it! 🙂 Thanks for the link to your blog. I really liked the quote you posted: “Adults do not learn from experience, they learn from processing the experience” (Judy Arin-Krupp). ETEC 565 was a good example of how effective reflection can be.
Looking forward to working with you, Andrea
Hi Brenda! Nice to see you again :). I suffered too with html code in ETEC 565 but I must say that it is a lot what we learned there. I love traveling too, I think it is the money best spent. Looking forward to continue learning with you! Angela.
Hi, Brenda.
I marvel at folks on here who work (maybe have kids) and do two courses. I wish I could do that. I always feel the pressure to totally commit my thoughts to one class at a time… especially now, since I’m back to school and have a two-month-old in the house! These last five courses of mine just had an extra challenge added to them!
I think using a blog for a whole course will be interesting, too… I kept a personal blog from ’05 – ’10, and started a beer-related blog of all thing last year. I find blogging is a great way to share info in a technologically creative way. How are you enjoying your post-class blogging?
See you around the blog,
Steve
According to Technorati, the blog count reached 70 million last year. Even though a quarter of them are most likely bot-created spam blogs, the quantity of content ‘in the cloud’ is still staggering. Blogs give everyone a voice to communicate, teach, spout opinions, learn and network. And with RSS technology, blog posts are quickly pushed […]
Continue reading Blogs Posted in: Emerging Markets Poll
Blogs are a fabulous way to interact and communicate to others. This program is a great model to emphasis just how powerful blogs really are; communicating, learning and teaching others all through a site designed to do so.
In our blended learning projects in elementary and secondary schools we have found that the use of blogs with frequent interaction between students and between teacher and students has resulted in an improvement in writing skills of our students. Their feedback to each other, and the knowledge that the writing was going to be viewed by many resulted in a greater effort to improve the quality of work…this took time, but I am now convinced of the value of blogs (and wikis too) for this purpose.
I’m not a fan of blogs. Maybe it comes out of my background but I guess I’m a snob about writing and I prefer writing to meet standards of audience, purpose, utility, organization and entertainment, something editorial gatekeepers used to enforce.
I think blogs are a good way for students to express themselves, as long as it is carried out well in the classroom. I think that they are a good student reflection tool and they can help to highlight student learning.
Blogs can bring huge opportunities for promoting critical thinking skills and develop content through e-portfolios (eP). Schools and Universities in Chile are starting to integrate blogs in instruction as a tool that support the face-to-face setting of learning. So, it is a technology that educators are needing to use.
I used a WordPress blog during summer school to upload course notes and important information (e.g. test/quiz info, etc.). I think there were some pros and cons, but overall was very successful. This year, I’m teaching Math in Tech Immersion Program and have created a course blog for my students. As regular school year is different from summer school and a new school year has just begun, I don’t know if it will be successful again. However, it’ll be a good experience for both my students and me.
A blog is an excellent tool in classrooms because I believe it provides increased access and exposure to quality information. It also promotes critical and analytical thinking which improves learning.
There no doubt that blogs are creating a serious wave across the internet and in the classroom. From current experience, students are showing a great liking for such an environment and the fact that their efforts are going global where others can view their end product.
Before you publish your posting, please make sure that you select a category (eg. Introductions) as well as assign some meaningful tags (keywords).
Everton Walker 1:40 pm on October 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Karen,
Nice work! I also like blogs that allow me to be in control. As a result, students think about what they plan to post as it will be deleted or not published if guidelines are not followed. I have also noticed that if the blog is not frequently updated and social media features integrated, students will show little or no interest in it.
Everton
Deb Kim 8:31 pm on October 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Karen and Everton,
I agree with you that I also like blogs that I can control.
I agree with you Karen that Blogger Dashboard was much harder to use compared to WordPress. I’ve been using WP for my classes since 2 years ago and students like how I’ve set up the blog.
Everton, you are right that students would not be interested if a blog is not updated frequently.
Deb
Juliana 4:28 pm on October 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Karen,
Thanks for the compliment! And I agree that sometimes blogs can look a little overwhelming. When there are long pages of text it can definitely get overwhelming and sometimes the page options of WordPress can decrease the overwhelming feeling.
I agree with you about Drupal and necessity of downloading everything to your computer. In a school system where you have to meet with IT requirements, a system like Drupal can be very cumbersome. I get the feeling that if you were looking at blogs like a venture that was targetted for the K-12 environment, you would prefer to see a cloud-based system. Is there anything else that you would like to see in blogging platforms to make them even better for your applications?
Juliana.
Karen Jones 5:49 pm on October 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Juliana,
I am glad for this opportunity to investigate different blogging platforms, and find myself preferring the ones that start to look more like multimedia webpages, i.e. Edublog and Posterous. I think the ability to impose privacy limits for class- or educational-only access is important in all web applications that are used for teaching, although that could be seen to impede a real community of learning, I guess. There is a definite approach to encouraging student participation in blogs, as Everton points out above, and I think it’s a case of me needing to play around a bit more in order to tailor the medium to my students’ learning styles and preferences.
Thanks!
KJ
Juliana 4:54 pm on October 19, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Karen,
Thank you for your post. I think in this day and age, it will be very important to have some sort of security features on blogs. I think that is a definite drawback for some of the free ones out there.
You also spoke of encouraging participation in blogs. What challenges have you seen with respect to participation?
Juliana.
bcourey 7:38 pm on October 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I agree with you that in the MET program we can be overwhelmed with the multitude of requests to create a blog for our eportfolio, but do you see the benefit for students to do the same thing? and would they too be overwhelmed if various teachers requested the same assignment? I am glad you are exploring the various platforms that are available for blogging – our question will be, is there a tool that would do an even better job?
ifeoma 8:40 pm on October 18, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Karen,
It sounds like your class is the digital village for the digital natives of today. Good job! I enjoyed reading your post! particularly because I found a lot of things there that I could relate to myself, e.g. reading other peoples blog and not making mine public. I find that the way you use blogs in your classroom resonates with my ideas about using blogs in the classroom. I am not a teacher but I completely agree with having Moderator rights to review posts before they are published. I like that feature because I think it will make life easier for both teacher and students in preventing inappropriate comments.
Ifeoma