Blogging and Teaching August 22, 2007

Here is a really good Blog for information about teaching and using blogs https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/avee/blogstoteach/ 

It has a variety of different links to information about ‘What a Blog is?’, ”How to use Blogs?’ etc… The why use Blogs is what i really paid attention to when reading this article. I believe that communication is the key for critical learning to occur and Blogs allow this to happen. Students can communiacate with one another like MySpace, Blogs allow students to be themselves, they can be creative and it is an outlet making the Blog feel like it is their own, giving them more pride in their work and hopefully they will do the work. This is a form of external motivation (the article talks about external motivation) because students will always want their Blog to be better than everyone else’s, so they will be externally motivated to complete their work and make it better in everyway possible than someone else’s.   

Our Group Wiki August 22, 2007

Wiki’s are a wonderful way of communicating with one another. They are similar to a blog, but not the same. The differences between a Wiki and a blog is that in a Blog you are the only one that can post to it, as i am doing now, and people can make comments on your Blog. Whereas with a Wiki you can have a group of people on 1 Wiki that can post at all different times, as long as they have the password and user name. As a requirement for this subject we have to create a Wiki, it is to be educational and have certain information on it. In saying that Wiki’s like Blog’s can have any kind of information presented on them, these can be very useful in the teaching world. Wiki’s can be used in the classroom, where you post links to some great information and the students have to find the information and post it to the Wiki, making it a site for just that topic. The Wiki can also be used later on in the year for revision for exams, or for a base of information for an upcoming assignment. This can be referred to throughout the year, and you won’t have to worry about students forgetting to bring in worksheets or books for a class, it can all be up on the screen in front of you.  In a  group work situation where students are always complaining that they are doing more work than the others, you can actually see how much work is being done, by who is posting the information. Also with it being online where everyone can access it, homework can be done without excuses and you can check how many people actually did their homework by accessing the Wiki. Here is a link to the Wiki we are doing for this subject http://soymocha.pbwiki.com/

Del.cioi.us August 22, 2007

Del.cioi.us, this a social bookmarks manager. You can add your bookmarks to the web, taking the storage from your computers hard drive to the internet, allowing others that you give your name and password to access to your favourite websites. This can be very useful especially if your computer hard drive crashes and wipes your memory, I know this all to well. But it is also useful if you want to access your favourites page from another computer, like while you’re at uni after you have done research at home the night before. This is a really good initiative and now that i have found out about it i will be surely posting some favourites on it for research and some fun activities. Here is a link to my bookmark page http://del.icio.us/soymocha

Joining Facebook August 22, 2007

Well today i joined Facebook in our lecture today, but i found out that if you type Faccebook, you don’t get a very nice site (if you get my drift). I did find that joining Facebook was very different to joining Flikr. Facebook was a lot harder to join than Flickr. Once i had joined Facebook, i found it very hard to log back in again, they didn’t accept my email address again, i’m not really sure what happened there but it could have been because everyone in our lecture was trying to join Facebook all at once, whereas with Flickr we had to do it at home. I think that Facebook is the new MySpace, it is a lot safer because of the security conditions which is better for everyone, but especially useful for school students. This could be very useful in a classroom activity, you could teach the students to social network, not that they really need much help doing that. It allows the students to be more creative, and it is not as boring. This could be used as a classroom in the virtual world, everyone can contribute, not just the noisy ones, the quiet ones as well. You can give them a topic to research, like all good ICT classes, it is up to the students to do the work. With Facebook you can see who adds to the page, which students are doing the work and who isn’t doing the work, and a big bonus is that you can keep out people who aren’t welcome (predators), which isn’t always possible in MySpace or other sharing sites. I think that this is a good blog and we should all read it http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/social-networking-in-schools-gets-a-boost-from-nsba/

Anyway here is a link to my facebook page, although it isn’t very educational, it is worth looking at just for a laugh. http://ndedu.facebook.com/home.php?

Blogger August 22, 2007

Last semester we had the pleasure of using Blogger to complete all of our assessments for another ICT class. After using Blogger and then changing to WordPress i have noticed a difference, it isn’t a significant difference, but i do prefer using WordPress as opposed to Blogger. WordPress allows you to import tables and more graphics than Blogger does, which as an Education student looking for new and exciting ways to teach secondary students this is a very big find and it makes me very excited. With WordPress there are many more templates for you to choose from where as when you sign up with Blogger there are only a few. I think as a teacher of high school students, they would prefer the extra choices available for their background, it makes it more their own space. With feelings like that they are more liklely to want to continue the work set and make it more creative and spend more time on the site and doing their work. Here is a link to my other blog so you can have a gander if you like http://karliesworld.blogspot.com/