I stumbled upon Bestiaria Latina Blog the other day as I was thinking about ways teachers are using blogs in their classes and across their curriculum. They have some good ideas of using blogs with your students.
As a classroom teacher I used to have students create web pages or websites for project assignments in Social Studies, Art and Technology, but now as faculty support for technology integration I have redesigned my thinking about the web and the use of websites vs. blogs.
Today blogs can be used in place of a website for any project-based learning activity allowing interaction between users and their audience. It's not just about creating a website for an audience anymore, but about creating space on the Internet for your audience to communicate and interact with the site creators. It's now become dynamic !
Many schools, I noticed a few years ago, were moving from School Web sites to School Weblogs to allow parents, students, and the community to add content and interact with faculty, staff and the site. Merriwether Lewis Elementary in Portland, Oregon was among the first to use a blog format as their school website. Very Dynamic !
Many teachers have set up blog sites for classes and their students; posting the latest class news, assignments and links to interesting subject area sites for student to research and post comments to the instructor.
A transition has occcured from putting up information for others to view to utilizing blogsites great potential as a communication tool between teachers, students and the world. A shfting of thought..its not about blogs as being the technology that's important; its about the dynamic presence on the Internet that is created by using this tool.
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1 comment:
thanks for the reference to Bestiaria Latina in the post - I've found your blog and subscribed (educational technology being an equal interest with Latin!).
so far, blogging with Bloglines has been a HUGE success with students. I am delighted! they will be publishing webpages later in the semester, but the blog has given them an easy, useful and confidence-building way to get started in their web publishing adventure.
at my school generally, basically nothing is happening with RSS - which is a shame! I've posted something about that in my blog: do other schools do a better job with RSS? it is insanely easy, thanks to Bloglines (blogger.com, which I have also used with students, was just a little bit too intimidating for the neophytes...)
anyway, here's my post about RSS at my school. I would love to see some examples of RSS being used for school news, especially at universities, so I could share those models with folks here at OU!
Technology News: RSS and a Modest Proposal for OU
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