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)
After reading back over this post, I began wondering how I could use a blog within my current context at prac; at Prep class.
ReplyDeleteDo you have any suggestions on how I could do this?
Is a whole class blog the only way?
How would this benefit my learners?
Maybe a blog could be used as a whole class to reflect on lessons/learning, where students discuss what they did, what they liked/disliked and what they learned.
This could be an engaging way of using metacognition in the early years.
What do you think?
Teagan,
ReplyDeleteI am with you. It would be difficult to incorporate blogs into an early years classroom with each individual creating their own blog. However, I see no harm in using a blog as a whole class tool. Perhaps you could set up a weekly blog where students can take turns in adding their thoughts about what they have learnt throughout the week. You could also add work samples, art works and photos of the students at work for the parents to take a look at and read.
They are just my thoughts for now, let me know if you think of something else.
Ash =)
Ash,
ReplyDeleteThey are great ideas..I like the suggestion about students posting their learnings on the class blog. I think blogs encourage metacognition, which greatly enhances student learning.
Teagan