I believe that blogging is a great tool in the classroom with benefits that are to great to ignore. Students get a taste into someone else's world and what they believe about a topic might be completely different from what they believe. One of the goals of social studies is to learn about other places in the world, and a great way to learn about other countries is by talking to the inhabitants of that country on a blog. In social studies grade 6 children are learning about China and this would be a perfect setting for using up a blog. As China has newly turned into a capitalist country the children could talk about how it has changed their lives in China, and the children in Canada could explain how capitlism affects them here. I can only see positives out of this blogging exercise as students learn about a country not from what a teacher tells them but from eye witnesses; very impacting learning.
Anne Davis (http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/2004/10/000180.php) explains that blogging is a way to link your classroom with another classroom somewhere else in the world. Anne is describing exactly what i proposed, in which students could share ideas about topics to other students across the world.
Teaching Today (http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/educationupclose.phtml/47) says that blogs are a great way to get students involved in discussion who might not normally talk in the classroom. Some children do not feel comfortable talking in the classroom and a blog is a great way to alleviate that fear.
If i were to use a blog in my classroom i would use the following steps to keep the students safe:
-Use a blog that only let certain people who have a password access the site
-Carefully monitor what the students write on the blogs to ensure comments are appropriate
-Have students check with the teacher before they are allowed to post anything, so he/she can make sure it is appropriate.
-I would not have any personal information about the students on the site except for their first name.
-That includes no pictures, addresses or phone numbers
-Inform parents and get their consent
-No email addresses allowed on the blogs
-Let the students know the strict guidelines that they must follow
These are just a few safeguards that need to be put in place before the students are permitted to start blogging.
Overall blogging is a great tool that enables communication of ideas over a new medium which the students can use to gain greater understanding of the world and people around them.
Friday, September 21, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
Wow i'm a blogger! My name is Ryan Seifert and I was born in South Dakota but have lived in Alberta for most of my life. I have been married for 3 years to my wife Heidi and we have a blast together. I love to do various sports but mainly now i stick to golf and the occasional floor hockey game. I work part time at the keg and will have been there for 3 years in November. It's a great job and i work with alot of fun people. I am in an after degree program at the U of L and can't wait to be a teacher, it feels like i have been in school forever.
There are many benefits to using blogging in the classroom but we also have to be careful of the challenges that it can create. Blogging could be a great tool for kids to communicate with other children in other parts of the world. For example in social studies students could converse back and forth about current events and how they feel about them or how the events affected their life. I thought a great example would be communicating with children from China to see how they felt of their country's new found capitalist ideals. By doing this it would accomplish one of the outcome's that was described in the ICT of aquiring alternate viewpoints using technology.
Blogging could be a great tool used as a way of communciation between students and the teacher. The teacher could have a blogsite which he/she could update daily with details of assignments or field trip specifics. Say if the student lost the instructions for an assignment they could simply look up the information on the blog. This style of communication is useful but should not be used as the main avenue for questions, students should continue to seek out teachers for help after class.
In the ICT it talks about how students should be able to navigate, edit, compose, and communicate using technology and blogging satisfies many of these outcomes. Students need to navigate the internet in order to get to the web site and they need to create their own blog which gains them more comfortability on the computer as a whole. Students will compose and edit pieces of imformation that they will display on their blogs and they can communicate with their peers using the blog.
Although i worry about internet predators who might look at the students blog. Hopefully secure sites could be set up that only people with access could only view.
Parents also have the opportunity to see what the students are learning and be able to check out homework due dates and a variety of information that could be posted on a class blog. But here again we have to be careful that the main type of teacher parent communciation is not through a computer but face to face.
Overall blogging could be a viable resource which has many positive outcomes that could be used for learning in todays classroom.
There are many benefits to using blogging in the classroom but we also have to be careful of the challenges that it can create. Blogging could be a great tool for kids to communicate with other children in other parts of the world. For example in social studies students could converse back and forth about current events and how they feel about them or how the events affected their life. I thought a great example would be communicating with children from China to see how they felt of their country's new found capitalist ideals. By doing this it would accomplish one of the outcome's that was described in the ICT of aquiring alternate viewpoints using technology.
Blogging could be a great tool used as a way of communciation between students and the teacher. The teacher could have a blogsite which he/she could update daily with details of assignments or field trip specifics. Say if the student lost the instructions for an assignment they could simply look up the information on the blog. This style of communication is useful but should not be used as the main avenue for questions, students should continue to seek out teachers for help after class.
In the ICT it talks about how students should be able to navigate, edit, compose, and communicate using technology and blogging satisfies many of these outcomes. Students need to navigate the internet in order to get to the web site and they need to create their own blog which gains them more comfortability on the computer as a whole. Students will compose and edit pieces of imformation that they will display on their blogs and they can communicate with their peers using the blog.
Although i worry about internet predators who might look at the students blog. Hopefully secure sites could be set up that only people with access could only view.
Parents also have the opportunity to see what the students are learning and be able to check out homework due dates and a variety of information that could be posted on a class blog. But here again we have to be careful that the main type of teacher parent communciation is not through a computer but face to face.
Overall blogging could be a viable resource which has many positive outcomes that could be used for learning in todays classroom.
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