'Blogs' in a 21st Century Learning Environment

After spending a fair amount of time creating and exploring Blogs, I have discovered a wondeful, simple and fun ICT to incorporate into my future classroom. With scaffolding and teacher support, students in today's classrooms would very much benefit from using blogs to enhance their learning. They enable students to collaborate on school tasks with their peers, receive feedback from others, share schoolwork and ideas with their classmates, teacher and parents, and complete a reflective journal. Teachers can also use blogs to post homework, collaborate with parents and reflect and share ideas with co-workers.

From creating my very own blog, I learnt so many new ICT based skills. I had to resize a photo, hyperlink, and set up and create a blog. All of these tasks were new to me, although quick and simple to learn. I have discovered that a blog encourages creativity, individuality and reflective thinking. These are alll important attributes of a 21st century learner.

The functuality of a blog is very suited to all levels of learners in the today's classroom, whether it's a whole class blog in the early years, or a way of completing homework and sharing with peers daily in the upper primary years.

"To make Blogger safer for kids, you can easily turn off the navigation bar in the header.....You can also use the new version of Blogger in Beta to create private blogs for your class, parents or school." (www.infinitethinkingmachine.org/stuff/Blogger.pdf)

To Blog or Not to Blog....

It has taken me a while, but I am finally posting my first blog! I created my blog over a week ago, but have been procrastinating, as I have been quite anxious about blogging. As a student in a 21st Century classroom, I still find myself to be a 'Digital Immigrant', as I only use a computer or ICTs for everyday things such as Word, the Internet, uploading photos, watching movies or communicating with friends and family through Facebook. Other than that, my ICT skills are very basic.

Over the past year and a half, I have begun to realise the potential and importance of ICTs in the learning environment, and I am hoping that through interaction with this course I am able to enhance my skills, and pedagogical knowledge of all digital ICTs, not just computers, especially in the Early Childhood sector.