Digital Tool 1: Blogs for Learning
Digital Tool 2: Wikis for Collaborative Learning
Digital Tool 3: Websites for Learning
Thinking this week had yet again an overload of activities to complete, I have just set up all the accounts and now comes the time consuming part of changing the design to suit me best, adding content and completing all of the readings for my analysis.
To view my blog click here - My Blog
A blog is a part of a website, for instance mine is part of blogspot.com, in which an individual (myself) maintains by regularly entering blog postings, entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other materials such as videos, images and links to further resources. The entries are displayed in chronological order from the newest post first to the oldest post last. By adding content, blogs can become very interactive as visitors may leave comments and suggestions as well as messages to the creator. Most blog postings are commentary about recent news in your town or country or as personal online journal entries. My blog has entries that encompass my learning journey through my university graduate diploma.
Reflection
Blogs such as George Siemens are created for educational purposes in which the author presents professional knowledge and links to important events, conferences, and so forth. So my belief is that as long as the purpose of your blog is purely for sharing educational content, such as a mixture of links, commentary, personal thoughts and essays then it's well worth the effort. According to Stephen Downes (2004) it gives students a chance to communicate with others all around the world, and hopefully receive feedback to enhance our knowledge base and learn from. Please take the time to view Stephen Downes website about blogs and also Will Richardson's blog.
PMI ABOUT BLOGS
Plus:
- Motivation
- Writing skills
- Reading skills
- Higher order thinking skills
- Collaboration/social interaction
- Network & Relationship building
- Community building
- Effective means of communication (for individuals, pairs, groups and so on)
- Support tool to promote reflective analysis
- Not boring (students can customize the design)
- Archive and publish students work
- Learn with far-flung collaborators
- Flexibility
- Manage the knowledge that members of the school community create
- Chronological order of blogs by the date posted
- Can be utilised as a personal journal
- Can link to heaps of new and useful teacher resources on the internet
- Students engage in the content provided and of other authors
- Allows ideas to be based on merit, rather than origin
- Allows readers to hear the day-to-day thoughts of anyone
- Allows students to have the same writing space to voice their opinion that supports all learning styles
- Provides a space for sharing opinions and learning from one another
- Gives students a voice, feeling of ownership and recognition from a large audience
Minus
- Some students will use blogging as a means for personal comments and observations
- How do you know what’s real and what’s not real on the internet?
- Conflict of interest between students
- Libelous content such as calling teachers or students ‘inappropriate names’ or personal threats
- Students may divulge information about the school and face legal action such as posting copyrighted or protected information
- Loss of student interest due to particular topics to blog about (topics chosen by teacher instead of student)
- Blogging can interact with the more restrictive domains of the educational system
Interesting
- Web blogs are not for everyone
- Blogging posts need to be monitored and by whom?
- There needs to be extremely clear direction, objectives and scaffolding provided throughout the journey
- Some blog sites are blocked in schools
In a teaching context
Blogs can be used to replace the standard class web page and teachers can post class timetables, classroom rules, assignment notifications, suggested readings and summaries of the readings, exercises, links to internet items that relate to their course and organised class discussions. As the information and communication technology grows from day to day, it is our job as teachers to support this learning environment evolving and structure the students learning in using the same processes.
We as future teachers will need to know how to write for a public audience, how to cite and link and why, how to use the comment tool in pedagogical ways, how to read web materials more efficiently as well as explore other ways to consider pedagogical uses of blogs. Blogging requires us to teach students to critically engage media, more to the point we as students need instruction on how to become efficient navigators in these digital spaces (EduBlog, 2007).
Reference:
EduBlog (2007). Rationale for Educational Blogging. Retrieved 12 April 2011, from
http://anne.teachesme.com/2007/01/17/rationale-for-educational-blogging/
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After creating my first wiki, in which my original thoughts were that it would be quite sophisticated, have undoubtedly been way over-estimated. I feel like I conquered this task with great compassion and am privileged to share with you what I have designed this far.
To view my wiki please click here - My Wiki
Even though plenty of students have collaborated on the wiki topic at this stage, we have not had sufficient time to indulge in the effective use as collaboratively learning on our own wiki's (well my wiki anyway). A fellow student of mine that creatively designed a wiki with me and has used her wiki collaboratively for educational purposes if you would like to view is Julienne Morrison. In this situation, the design of a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats (SWOT) Analysis has been utilised perfectly as students interact and voice their opinions on the wiki topic by editing Julienne's Wiki.
This analytical tool encourages critical thinking about several aspects of a topic and below you will see a summary of our student SWOT Analysis.
Strengths
- Collaborative learning
- Interactive fun
- Scaffolding effectively pays off
- Continuous evolution of news
- Gain trust of fellow students or followers
- Increased engagement from students
- Development of social skills
- Quality brainstorming
- Wide range of input from many different aspects
- Allows integration of technology
- Unlimited teaching and learning experiences
- Higher order thinking/ Critical reflection/ Analysis
- Easy to use
Weaknesses
- All content can be accidentally or purposely deleted
- Requires trust of all followers
- Technology not robust
- Some wikispaces are banned in schools
- Lots of fiddling in the edit mode to get the desired appearance
Opportunities
- Integrated learning
- Shared knowledge, experiences and opinions
- Relationship building
- Creativity development
- High order thinking skills development
Threats
- Trust hardship
- Acceptance for changes (improvements and non-improvements)
- Continuous monitoring
- Possible breach of copyright
So as you can see, the work of several students in collaboratively working in wiki's is effective and we get to typically share the workload and get a better and bigger view of the subject. The main purpose for the creation of my wiki is so that students can share teaching resources and communicate in this space their views on different aspects of teaching.
Lastly this week was the creation of a master website. Mine might look very plain so far but let me assure you that if you tried to design one yourself, you would either have too much time on your hands or it would depict something similar to mine.
To view my website click here - My Website
I have discovered that websites are intense. There is a lot to work with and it's very time consuming. Not to say that it won't pay off in the long run, but for now, it looks a little dull and the following SWOT analysis will hopefully provide you with a brief overview on the use of websites.
Strengths
- Users are able to connect with a worldwide audience
- Ideal for linking several other websites, activities, blogs, games, information and so on
- Stable and well established
Weaknesses
- No interactive or collaborative learning shown
Opportunities
- Users come to terms with the recognition of published work and therefore must take responsibility to present accurate research
- If well designed, can be a great source of information
- Word of mouth can get around and expand your website globally
Threats
- Dangers of misinformation
- Suitability check for accurately published websites and links
I believe that students must be able to embrace and then engage in these eLearning opportunities. If they fail to do so, they will not learn and as the times change quickly, so does my thoughts and opinions on the above mentioned topics as I begin to realise how important these tools are and putting together the pieces to view the bigger picture is of the main aspect that I have right now.
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