To be literate in the 21st century students will require 'the flexible and sustainable mastery of a repertoire of practices with the texts of traditional and new communications technologies via spoken language, print, and multimedia, and the ability to use these practices in various social contexts' (Literate Futures: Report, 2002, p.9) In the classroom setting students will require the ability to use technologies and an ability to critically analyse texts. No one can deny that we live in a diverse society and students need to know the social responsibilities as they become active citizens in an ever changing world. Active citizenship is a focus in the New National Curriculum (ACARA, 2009) one way to promote this is the implantation of digital tools.
A blog for example used in conjunction with Bloom's Taxonomy and purposeful pedagogy (Frangenheim, 2006) is a good way of encouraging higher order thinking as the students make reflective entries and journal their learning. This not only allows the student to view evidence of their learning journey but also teachers and parents. The instant reward of having their writing published requires the learner to actively participate in the responsibilities of publishing and the assessing of reliability and ethics of other Web assets (CQU .http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/resource/view.php?id=91800). This could assist some students with the motivation to write as they recognise the authentic educational experience.
Blogs allow collaborative learning as other students can make postings and add to the learning of other students while unknowingly add to their own learning by justifying responses and expressing their understanding.
The blog allows the safety setting to be altered in the navigation bar increasing the protection for students. Collaborative learning situations can be created through the Internet as the teacher can invite comments from other schools around the globe thereby increasing the students knowledge of the world and the global society that they are part of.
The weakness of blogs is that it does not allow for students to work simultaneously as 'ether pad' does.
I'm posting a comment to my own blog just to see if it is possible.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Blogs are a wonderful way for students to learn collaboratively. They have access to 'chat' to other students outside the classroom and learn from a range of different online resourses where they can share ideas and information.
ReplyDeleteBlogging is about sharing. Through the use of blogs in the classroom your students can share opinions, thoughts, ideas, concepts, resources, links, activities and lessons. Blogging also provides an area for your learners to reflect. In education, discussion alone can breed some of the best outcomes for you as a teacher (Zimmer, 2010). Blogging brings education together and can be a powerful tool in becoming a better educator. Richardson (2009, p. 7) explains six reasons why blogs are an attractive edition to the classroom:
ReplyDeleteBlogs
1. Are a constructivist tool for learning.
2. Expand the walls of the classroom.
3. Archive the learning that teachers and students do.
4. Are a dramatic tool that supports different learning styles.
5. Enhance the development of expertise in a particular subject.
6. Teach students the new literacies they will need to function in an ever expanding information society.
References
Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. California, United States of America: Corwin Press.
Zimmer, M. (2010). Tools for the 21st Century Teacher. Retrieved from: http://issuu.com/mzimmer557/docs/tools_for_the_21st_century_teacher