Week 2 Reflection

Using a blog is a lot easier than I first expected it to be. I wasn’t sure what they are all about, and I am still learning. They seem to be real similar to Facebook, which I am familiar with. They are very user friendly and I’m catching on quickly. RSS Readers are completely new to me, so I find myself struggling a little. There is a wealth of information available on these and it’s hard keeping up with all of the updates to everything that I’m interested in. I’m trying to learn more about them so that I’m more comfortable using them on a daily basis. I do like how you get updates on topics that you are interested in automatically, you don’t have to go looking for them.
I think that a blog can fit under a few levels of the cone. If you keep your blog very basic and are just posting written items, your blog falls under the visual symbols category. Dale refers to the chalkboard as a widely used visual symbol. If you’re just writing your thoughts and ideas on your blog, it’s equivalent to writing them on a chalkboard. Once you start adding pictures, videos, links, etc. to your blog, you’re moving to different levels of the cone. A teacher could post a video on their blog of them doing a demonstration of a science experiment. The student could watch the video at home, if they were sick that day, and conduct the same experiment at home. The possibilities are endless granted the students have access to the technology at home.
I think that RSS Readers will also fit under the visual symbols level of the cone. Like I mentioned earlier, RSS is very new to me, and I’m still learning. It could probably also fit under the motion picture level if there is a link on the story to a video clip. I think that both RSS Readers and blogs will move down the cone levels towards direct purposeful experiences as I have more time to work with them and learn more about them.
One “imaginative” educational use of a blog would be for a teacher to set up a classroom blog. All of the students could create their own blogs and subscribe to each others’, as we are doing for this class. Then the students would have a place to go, outside of the classroom, where they could reflect on their school work and their classmates’ school work. The students would get immediate feedback from their classmates. If the teacher wanted the students to comment on other students’ work, they would be able to do that on the blog, at home, and not take up class time reading each others’ work.
To use a RSS Reader “imaginatively” wouldn’t be too difficult. For a current events assignment, the students could subscribe to a top story feed from the news that interests them and follow it for an hour or so. This would not be a possible assignment if the students were using just the newspaper. The newspaper is not up to date and only publishes one story on a specific topic a day. The student would have to wait until the next day to get the follow up story.
I think that blogs and RSS Readers are a great tool to use in the classroom. I am looking forward to learning more about them so that I can incorporate them into my daily routine. I just have to find the time to do so!