Week 3: Reflection 2

The Technological Tools of Pedagogy: The Blog

Source: http://unbounce.com/content-marketing/your-blog-your-rules/

This week we looked more into the tools available in the world of technology that could be used as a means of education, learner engagement, and creative productivity- blogs, wikis, and websites.  In this post I will be taking a close and analytical look at the blog (abbreviated form of web log).

What are blogs, and how are they used?

Blogs have been around for a couple of decades now, and have in that time evolved from simplistic journals and diaries to very interactive and versatile tools for information, connectivism and functionality.  Modern blogs can contain imbedded media (videos, audio, pictures, links) that give the reader (and writer!) a myriad of options to expose the world wide audience to whatever it is the author is ‘blogging’ about.  Blog topics are as endless as the imagination, ranging from mundane daily accounts of life (like a diary), updating readers on the inner thoughts and actions of the author , to professional news reports, journals, travel information, questionnaires, and much more. 

For this university course, the first thing we were to do was to set up our own blog.  I had never had my own blog before, for whatever reason I didn’t deem it totally necessary for my life.  But setting up this one I was amazed and even enthralled once I saw how easy and exciting it was to personalize it and give it the appearance and layout I wanted.  In a word: easy.  Gone are the days when the average person can only passively observe the web.  With Web 2.0 (What is Web 2.0?), construction of your own web space has been made extremely user-friendly.  For the blog, easy manipulation of provided backgrounds, colour schemes, layouts and fonts make for a simple yet interesting way of personalising your own little domain on the world wide web, done in such a way the average lay-person would get it with next to no difficulty.

What it means for education

Source: http://instructionaltechtalk.com/3-reasons-students-blogging/

Blogs also can serve as an effective education tool for learners.   Through writing, reading and commenting on blogs, learners become engaged in the learning process.  Teachers could have a blog set up with course work and information, and require students to read, reflect and comment.  For more learner centred work, the students themselves could write course appropriate blogs to analyse, reflect, and create their own tools to demonstrate their growing declarative and procedural knowledge of a topic, linking to other sites, wikis, video and tools for user interaction.  It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but in this day and age it might be more appealing to the modern tech-savvy student than perhaps a dull pen-to-paper essay or report.  Learning styles vary, and educators need to use a wide variety of media to engage and build learner enthusiasm and learner centred approaches.  Blogs are one such possibility.

In the future I plan to teach English, German, and French.  Blogs could be a useful tool in the classroom in many ways.  They could provide a scaffold and link to vocabulary activities and games for rote learning or guides to grammar and cultural topics and articles, connecting the learners with a vast international audience. Using the SAMR Model (see earlier related post here), which was developed by Dr Reuben Puentedura and describes the ways technology is used in pedagogical environments, let me explain some possible implementations of how blogs could be used in future teaching.

S (Substitution) – At this level, a blog could be used as a simple substitute for creative writing, essays, reports and reflections as opposed to pen and paper format.

A (Augmentation) – One can improve on the functionality here by having students find topic related blogs (e.g. German culture, food, travel) and interact through the provided tools and links and/or comments.

M (Modification) – Now transforming the normal classroom into a more tech-integrated experience, an example could be to have students analyse a text (e.g. Shakespeare), then share thoughts and opinions through embedded wikis or ‘jigsaw’ activities, providing students with a large online audience and a social constructivist and scaffolded approach.

R (Redefinition) – Using technology in a way that couldn’t have been possible before, students could create blogs, make personal videos, recreate scenes from novels using Upstage or Xtranormal, add interactive tools (e.g. vokis) to guide/pose/answer questions and link multimedia applications to the blog for a varied and eye-catching report.

The Good, the Bad, the Blog

I came up with a PMI (Positive/Minus/Interesting) chart for using blogs as an educational tool.  Let this voki from the distant future continue and explain. Note: His is a slightly abridged version due to text length limits. If you cannot see or hear him, you can click here 

Positive	Minus	Interesting
* Blogs are easy to make and     use - user-friendly  * As the author, you have     control over content  * Versatile with what you can     put on them  * Could be a more engaging     method of learning for     students  * Can use both teacher-centred     AND learner-centred     approaches	* Can be seen as a simple substitute      for writing on paper  *  Readers can only comment on      content, not much real interaction  *  Comments can be monitored and      removed by author or moderator	* Most schools do not allow and      block blog sites at schools  *  Would all learners benefit and find      the use of blogs helpful, engaging,      and interesting?  *  A possible medium for online      harassment and bullying?

 
And I'll leave you with a humorous interpretation of Bloom's Taxonomy according to Seinfeld.
Until next time!

References:
Web 2.0 Link  http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html