Despite being on the internet for many years, and taking part in various social media, I have never had a blog before. It's not that I don't like to write, I love it. As a matter of fact, I occasionally "blogged' on my Facebook page when I would have time under the "notes" section. I guess I never saw the use in setting up my own blog. I see it's potential while using it for this class in the classroom. In my particular situation, I have fourth graders that love to share their work, no matter what it is, I could see having my students next year start a blog, update it weekly or bi-weekly, and having them subscribe to Feedly to get updates from their fellow students so that they can read and comment on their blogs.
The nice thing about using Feedly is the convenient location not only for all the blogs, but for pretty much any site I want to get updates for. After adding the blogs from the members in our class, I added a blog I have been really bad about checking lately. It's a blog dedicated to Colgems Records (the subsidiary label that produced The Monkees, one of my all-time favorite bands), just to have something different other than technology related stuff to look through (not that those aren't interesting, mind you). After adding the Colgems blog, I noticed something really cool about Feedly. It posts the latest articles first, with a picture and text preview of the article that you can select and read more about. I see this on other news based sites, it's kind of cool to have one of your own! Once I subscribed to all my classmates blogs, I can see their posts as they come. As I mentioned above, I would like to get my fourth graders involved in blogging next year when they get Chromebooks. A Feedly account would be a great way to get them involved in reading each other's work, with having one handy location to access that information.
After doing the wiki project, I can see great benefit to doing a project with it. In fact, it's given me an idea for something I can use for the final project at the end of the year. My students do a lot of collaborative work in my classroom, particularly for Science and Social Studies. Our Social Studies curriculum has our students investigating many different concepts, often times using the internet as a resource. For example, I could take a concept we just covered, the Circular Flow of a Market Economy, and have a group of students expand on each section of the circular flow. Each section could be a page on a Wiki, with hyperlinks for each section interwoven through the page. Each student would be able to edit the pages if they see an inaccuracy or the need for expansion on the topic. They could also work with the other groups to make sure their links get included on the project. It would be a great way to get groups working together, and have the entire class contribute to one project.
Dale's Cone is a representation of the movement in learning from the concrete to the abstract, from, as Dale puts is, "direct purposeful experiences" to "verbal symbols." Recalling the first time I heard of Dale's Cone of Experience in my Human Development class years ago, learners "move" down through the cone as the develop cognitively, learning through various audio-visual experiences that grow more abstract. Inherently, I would believe blogging (combined with RSS and Wiki) would cater to the more abstract portion of the cone. Since most of it is text based, it would be hard for more concrete learners to pick up on some of the verbal symbols that are used. However, more an more is changing as technology develops. I heard of a program the other day from a colleague called "SnapChat," and while not technically a blog, it uses pictures to tell of experiences. This could be used to help the most concrete of learners pick up on some of the more abstract cues learned from visual mediums. Many people have a "vlog" (video log), or a podcast, which could cover the upper parts of the cone.
Siegel's article, "Falling Asleep at Your Keyboard, The Case for Computer Imagination" discusses the need to not just incorporate technology into the classroom, but to use it foster creativity with our students. I can definitely see how blogs could contribute to "computer imagination." Yes, you can write what could be a blog entry on a sheet of paper with a pencil, but that's where the interactivity stops. By using a blog (along with an RSS service like Feedly), the student can not only open up their own musings to a larger-scale audience (though, with fourth grade, I would limit it to those students in our classroom), but the student can also provide feedback for other students' work. One practical use I could see for a blog in the classroom would be a classroom newsletter, where there is one blog, yet multiple students could contribute content to it (i.e. articles about what we are learning in the different subject areas). One area my students could use more help with is peer editing. The use of blogs (with an RSS feed that the students could have a subscription to other people's work) would enable the students to provide some more in-depth dialogue via the comments section (which the instructor would check the comments for positive critique), rather than saying "it's good" and moving on.
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