Journal Post #8

Chapter Eight: Communicating and Networking with Websites, Blogs, Wikis, and More

 

 

 

 

Dan Zen via Flickr

 

 

 

                                           

Focus Question 2: How can teachers use email or instant messaging to foster information exchanges with and among students?

Email and instant messaging can be a great tool both teachers and students. Email is great for when students have homework or projects they are completing out of class and realize they don’t understand something. They can simply email the teacher their specific question and the teacher can respond back. Instant messaging among students can be great for the same reason, students can give their feedback to each other as well as answer questions before asking a teacher.

 

Tech Tool 8.2: Posting and Publishing with Digital Image Scanners

Scanners are pretty amazing and I have personally used them many times to make my life a lot easier. Whenever you need a copy of something, like a driver license, or birth certificate for official reasons, you can just scan the copy and not have to have the original with you. Digital scanners are even more amazing and can be brought into the classroom. Anything you have that was written down manually can be scanned and uploaded to a computer so you can share with the class a list of books, titles, questions for a test, an itinerary, or even a hand drawing. So you can upload printed or drawn information to a teacher website or a blog. Teachers can also use digital scanners to add visual images, like a hand drawing, to handouts, notes or learning resources for students.

 

Summary/Important Points

As someone that doesn’t know a lot about wikis, I’m interested in learning about them. A wiki is defined as a website or blogspace that is collaboratively edited and maintained by a group of people. The first wiki that I frequently use is Wikipedia. If you want to know the gist about something, you go there. The information is normally pretty accurate but you have to be careful though because anyone can submit the information that it added. The website is maintained, it might just take a little while for the inaccurate information to be caught and removed, which would be terrible if you used the false information for a homework purpose. I of course also use the class eme2040 wiki, it’s convenient since all of the info is added by the teacher, and so if I’m ever unsure of an assignment, I can almost always answer my own question by reading something on there.

Teacher blogs, I think are a great idea. Three ways teachers use blogs are for student learning, specific information about an assignment topic can be posted for students to read. Student/Family communication, parents can access this and see what their child is learning in their class. Professional networking is another way teachers’ use blogs, they can see what other teachers are doing and showing their students and can spread ideas amongst each other.

Blogs, wikis and websites are all great assets to teachers by giving students places to find information on their own.

Resources

Maloy, R. W., Verock-O'Loughlin, R., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, B. P. (2007). Problem Solving and Inquiry Learning with Software and Web Tools. Transforming Learning with New Technologies (pp. 174-205). Boston: Pearson.

Dan Zen via Flickr