This process became quite time consuming for me as I took a long time reflecting on how blogs could be most appropriately used and the benefits of them in my teaching context. Blogs are currently used as a response platform as part of Project 600. As Sandy mentioned in her blog, Exploring Blogs, the group blog format used this year has increased the level of student interaction, but the Project 600 team should consider the process we ask students to use when uploading tasks to make it easier for them to respond to teacher feedback. Throughout this process I considered how we could expand the use of the blogging platform to deepen student learning.
Features of the technology
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Affordances (activities and practice)
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Affordances (examples of pedagogy and designs)
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Online
log of communication using embedded text, audio, visual materials, links that
are presented in chronological order
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Supports multimodal learning to
share personal learning journey in developmental sequence
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Homework
tasks are uploaded to their blog
Students
can use blog as a reflection tool to demonstrate their understanding of new
content being learnt
Students
respond to visual stimulus using prompts provided by teacher
Groups
of students work collaboratively by uploading separate elements of a group
task to provide completed task. Students respond to and edit tasks before
submitting final version. Use of student generated multimodal elements
encourages creativity
Flip
the classroom: students watch an embedded educational video as a homework
task and respond individually in their blog to facilitate personal
understanding. These postings are then used as the basis for group discussion
in the classroom. Students then revisit and edit their blog posting to
demonstrate their shared knowledge
Teachers
can support learners individually by providing targeted feedback with prompts
for students to reflect
|
Comments
can be posted in response to blog posts and are displayed in chronological
order
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Supports
critical thinking and interaction with anywhere, anytime access. Promotes use
of feedback between blog owners and readers
|
|
Personalisation
of the appearance and structure of the blog either by the use of available
templates or advanced features to individualise to a greater degree
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Encourages
ownership of learning space regardless of technical capability. Those with
higher technical knowledge have the capacity to individualise to a greater
degree and level of creativity
|
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HTML
tab allows for embedding of online elements
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Allows
for digital artefacts from various online locations to be shared from the one
location. Also provides the opportunity for additional features to be added
to blog posts
|
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Link to
blogs created by the same author within one blog by use of pages links in
layout menu
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Allows
blog owner to provide easy access to several blogs from the one online space
|
|
Google+
Hangouts enable groups to have real-time conversations and video chats that
can be recorded and uploaded directly to the blog
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Supports
real-time collaboration amongst peers, students and ‘experts’ from wider
community and the benefit of accessing recordings of these conversations at a
later date
|
|
Various
gadgets (also known widgets) are tools/applications that can be added to the
blog to enhance the functionality: follow by email, list popular posts, RSS
Feed, link list of websites or other blog pages
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Followers
can receive up-to-date notification of posts. Supports benefit of community
by easy access to items that other followers value.
Linking to outside artefacts, websites, news articles to expand support ideas
|
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Blog
settings allow security settings to be either public or private
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Level
of access can be determined depending on needs and personal preferences
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Permission
can be given so that additional authors can add material to the blog
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Promotes
engagement of learning community and sharing of collective knowledge
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N.B. I asked Google how to embed a table in Blogger as I wanted to learn another skill. Mr Google is a wealth of knowledge.
This is the link I used to assist me with this: http://www.ganisphere.com/2013/04/create-table-in-blogger-using-ms-word.html
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