Week 3: Web 2.0 & 3.0 in an education setting

Some great uses for blogs in Education:

A screen shot of Common Craft's YouTube video "Blogs in Plain English".

• Teachers can use blogs to post class times and rules, assignment notifications, suggested readings and exercises.
• Teachers can link to internet items that relate to their course. Blogging allows the teacher to write what are in essence short essays directed specifically toward their students. These entries are not mere annotations of intersting links; they effectively model the teacher's approach and interest in the subject for their students.
• Blogs can be used to organise in-class discussions. the converstation possible on blogs is also an amazing tool to develop our community of learners. The students get to know eachother better by visiting and reading blogs from other students; blogs are personalised so students can discover, in a non-threatening way, their similarities and differences. The loud student and the quiet student have the same writing space to voice their opinion, putting students in a situation of equality.
• Students may be asked to create their own blogs as part of the course grade, and comment on others as a peer feedback activity.

Blogs are easy to use and offer a powerful tool kit for the support of collaborative and individual learning that adhears to the patterns of contemporary information-intensive work and learning outside of formal education settings.

Downs, S 2004, Educational Blogging, viewed 17 July 2012, http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/educational-blogging

Reflection on the use of Wikis in an educational setting.

A screen shot of Common Craft's YouTube video "Wikis in Plain English".

Check out my go at a Wiki for an Art Competition I made up.

A wiki is an online space where users and guests can edit, modify, add, remove information with intuitive editing tools. It could be compared to a never-ending, paginated sheet of online butcher’s paper.

Teacher context: The history function can be very useful to identify the contribution of each student to the blog, authoring dates, and progress of students.

The nature of the learning to be done must be carefully considered and scaffolded by the teacher- set a task such as the six learning hats or a PMI to generate and encourage a focused student contribution.

Student context: When partnered with a blog, students can add a link of their collaborative wiki. Can be used as a reflective tool. It’s fun and interactive.

Reflection on the use of Wikis in an educational setting.

Check out my webpage for my students across all year levels.

It is great for students to be able to access all their learning support materials in one place. Also as they progress into later year levels they are familiar already with the functionality and usage of the webpage.

It also allowed me to add fun parts such as the completion page.

Great for me to make available all my resources online.

Potential to add an “extra reading/resources” alongside the page for students who are ahead of the class to access other activities or materials to extend themselves.

I think I would prefer to have students in middle school use blogs, and have the senior years create web pages- I am not sure why.