For this week's assignment, conduct some research on the web to see if you can find at least one good example of how a blog is successfully being used in an educational manner. Once you have selected the blog (or blogs), discuss the following:
- Who created the blog?
- What is its purpose?
- Who are the participants?
- What do you think are some of the characteristics of the blog that make it successful?
- Are there any characteristics of the blog that you feel could be used for a blog we might add to any of the websites we discussed in this week's class? Please elaborate.
- Is there anything else you would like to add about the blog (or blogs) you found?
7 comments:
The blog I found is "Have Fun with English" (http://fwe2.motime.com/). The blog belongs to one English teacher in Portogal. From my perception, the purpose of her blog is to be used as a way to communicate with her students outside of the class and as a place for her students to practice English. I am interested in her blog because I can see a very useful application of it. She uses her blog to share students' work, teach them English lessons and vocabolary (she posts messages in English, but she would give Portugese translations to words that she thinks might be too hard for her students), and share her personal experience.
I found a blog site, http://authorvisit.blogspot.com/, that was created by a teacher at Eastview Elementary. The purpose of this site was for students and classes from the school to view and discuss the items that the author, Ron Hirschi, was sending to their school. Individual students, classes, teachers, and Ron Hirschi all interacted on this blog to communicate with each other about the objects. They were able to ask the author questions and respond to him. This blog was successful because it created a continuous interaction with the author that would not have been feasible without the assistance of the web. They were able to post on their own time and he was able to respond at his own pace as well. I think that the images were probably a motivating factor for the younger students to remain interested as well. I think that using images and video would be useful for our blogs as well because it gives posters something else to comment on and respond to other than just text.
I also found http://edublogs.org/ which could be helpful for teachers looking to create blogs for their own classes.
I chose a blog created by Brad Allard, (http://fc.burlesonisd.net/~ballard/) an AP Govt and AP US History teacher at Burleson High School. The purpose of the blog is to distribute daily homeowrk and assignment material and serve as a forum for students to talk about class. The participants are students in his AP classes. I think that it is a successful blog based on the number of posts (172)compared with the next highest posted blog (82) in the district. (http://bisdblogs.net/communities/Bloggers.aspx?GroupID=9)
I think it is appealing asthetically and I like that it adds a javascript calendar on the menu to compliment the list of entries by month. What I think is negative about the blog is the student use of the posts. Of the comments that I read, most were praising Mr. Allard for being a "cool" teacher and so on. There really wasn't an assignment that generated student participation in the sense of an online conversations.
Another interesting site I found was EdBlogger Praxis. http://educational.blogs.com/edbloggerpraxis/school_district_blog/index.html
The blog that I found most interesting was the “Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas,” http://texasedequity.blogspot.com/ . The creators of this blog are Professor Angela Valenzuela of UT and Patricia Lopez a UT student. This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level. It is opened to the public to post. The posting are relevant – they have an obvious pertinence, appropriateness, and application. The articles’ information source is provided as a link. The comments and the discussions are driving right to the heart of the matter, no lengthy digressions. Links to other material that is on the topic is provided. Links/references to other educational bloggers as well as major sources dealing with each subject are provided. This blog was easily searchable via main body content heads. A nicely organized list of previous articles and posting is supplied. The page set-up was consistent through out the document. The purpose was presented with clarity. One thing that I walk away with from this blog is the possibility of using blogs as initial sources to finding research information that is specific in nature. All of the articles and the comments presented on each article were thought provoking. Some of the responses prompted me to think about gaps that may exist in the discussions are possibly even more so in the research of some of the topics discussed. Certainly, in my mind this might be a means for finding new research topics.
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/
This is Tim Ferriss's blog named after his book, The Four Hour Work Week. Some of the stuff is fluff, but there are some very good posts on outsourcing, finance, and futures. Tim Ferriss, described as a "polymath," writes all the posts. I think the blog and the book can attribute their success to innovative thinking about life and the typical American worker. Ferriss pushes the envelope regarding personal freedom and I think that idea is very catchy right now.
I chose to write about http://educational.blogs.com/ , a site that catalogs and organizes educational blogs, highlighting those that are more widely viewed or are more popular.
Educational Weblogs offers a variety of titles that are useful to educators, and has topics for nearly every discipline. By highlighting the blogs by popularity, and by focusing on one new blog weekly, Educational Weblogs does a great job of offering compelling blogs that are focused on learning.
One of Educational Weblogs biggest assets is its aggregation service: it finds examples of blogs that are educationally oriented and displays them on the site. Sites can also be added by those who create them – and can be used by audiences around the globe. With this site (and others), its possible to create a collection of blogs and to share the collection with those you chose.
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