Digital Tools group 1- Blogs-Wikis-Websites

Digital Tools  group 1- Blogs - Wikis- Websites

What is a blog?

          A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art, photographs, sketches, videos, music, audio, which are part of a wider network of social media

Source: wikipedia

Blogs:

I have started E-learning course and one of the first things we had to do was to set up our own blog, which currently looks like it does underneath but more information will be added soon!

          ICT's  and blogs are powerful tools for teachers and students.  ICT( Information and Communications Technoogy) is the name given to any digital device. This includes but is not limited to computers and the affordances of the internet, including a range of read-write tools. Scanners , hand-held devices, mobile phones, cameras, digital voice recorders, iPods, MP3 players, GPS devices and digital microscopes are all ICT. ( Moodle, 2012). ICT's provide the students with a variety and also interesting resources can be incorporated together with learning context and the curriculum, it is important to present information which will make students use higher order thinking skills and scaffolding.

Blogger tour -  Will describe more about the blogs and will take you through the different information on blogs.

Blog analyzer- http://www.webseoanalytics.com/free/seo-tools/blog-analyzer.php. This website analyses your blog. I have analysed mine and here is some of the results: It is quite interesting and it explains what the domains mean after you analyse your blog.

Swot analysis of blogs an enterprise perspective from enterprisezweinull

Extended Exploration of a blog:

Affordances:

For teachers: Using edublogs for example.

• The possibility to share materials, news, downloads, links and more with the students daily.
• Facilitate online discussions and collaboration.
• Create a class publication that students can easily publish to and you can easily edit.
• Replace your newsletter and stay in touch with parents about what is going in class.
• Get your students blogging so that they can share their work and thoughts.
• Share your lesson plans.

For students:

• Sharing the materials with everyone and finding the 'voice'.
• Encourages the enthusiasm for writing and creating.
• Blogs can be easily edited and updated by the author of the blog
• Other students and friends can comment on the blog pages created by others.
• Blogs can be used for scaffolding and as a life- long learning tool.
• The written blogs can be viewed by many and it provides the students with the feeling of connectedness.

Resource: Educational Blogging.
http://supportblogging.com/Educational+Blogging

Adding things to the blog:
With blogs you can add an image, third party such as flickr can be used aswel for uploading the edited photos to your blog. Adding videos is also posible. Blogger accepts AVI, MPEG, Quicktime, Real and Windows files and the video must be less than 100 MB in size. 

Can't add:
Audio files or powerpoints or files and Microsoft Word documents. Wiki would have to be used for that.

Positives-  Easy to use, step by step instructions, can be accesssed at the Blogger Tour. Interesting and encourages creativity, can change layout, font, make it personal. Can be timelined and the information can be organized and sorted out. Automatically saves while you typing. Can have drafts and publish whenever the full paper is ready. It is fun. Can keep the blog private.

Negatives- Can be slow when typing at times, gets overloaded, everyone can see the material if it is not made private, material could be criticised, could create issues in the classroom, some students might not want to publish their thoughts and ideas. Some students might not have access to the computer or the internet at home. When typing, the capital letters don't automatically apply, like in word documents, so the typing can be a bit slower.

Applications- Could be used weekly, to reflect on the learnt material, mainly use it at school and at the computer rooms, unless all the students have the access to the computer at home. Homework could be supplied, diaries could be kept for poetry for example. Blogs could be used to scaffold the information and to access the weekly information and activities, added by the teacher.

Possible usage of blogs in German and English classes: some ideas.

German: ideas.

Students can create a German blog, browse pictures relating to Germany, describe the pictures, write in German. Upload German You-tube videos, German songs. Do a presentation and share it with the class, allow other students to comment on each other's blogs.

Blogging very much supports learning theories of Social Constructivism and Connectivism:  

What is a wiki?

My wiki can be accessed here http://www.wikispaces.com/user/my/henny1987.
         A wiki is an online space where users and guests can edit, modify, add, remove information with intuitive editing tools. It could be compared to a never-ending, paginated sheet of online butchers paper. Working in a wiki requires rules and etiquette. Especially given that one student is able to remove, overwrite or edit the work of another. Whilst the previous work can be easily recovered using the history function of the wiki, it is inconvenient and poor etiquette unless it is an agreed upon activity. The history function can be very useful to identify the contribution of each student to the blog, authoring dates, and progress of students.

One drawback of wikis is that they cannot accommodate multiple, concurrent authors. If two or more people are editing a wiki at one time, only the work of one will be saved. If concurrent editing is the best way to work, spaces such as Google Docs are more suitable, in fact are ideal.

Wiki would be great for the class of students, where I could provide the topic and us the De Bono's hats for different perspectives. Wiki is effective because the whole class can access and contribute to the teacher-guided activity. Commnets and posts can be left in order to reflect and contribute to the opinions and the learning. Wiki reflection can be found on my blog here

What is a website?

          How does a website, or online space work? In the "good old days", you had to be a web author to create a coded web page. It is still strongly recommended that you become familiar with snippets of code because it allows you to manipulate and customise your pages.
These days, most online spaces have what is called a WYSIWYG editor - "what you see is what you get". It is much like Word, or PowerPoint. You put up your content, and the program does the coding for you.so ANYONE can be a web author. Some programs like Weebly make it even easier by allowing you to insert place-holders, into which you add your own content.

What makes a website fantastic is that you can upload only one of everything in a range of spaces custom built for each type of artefact. For instance, SlideShare is for Powerpoints, Flickr is for images (and video), of course YouTube is definitely for videos. And in your website, you are able to embed code, which embeds the artefact into your webpage. This is how I added the YouTubes to this page. Furthermore, you are able to link from one page to another using Linking, which allows you to move up and down, side to side across the web at will.
One VERY IMPORTANT thing to remember is that a website can draw together artefacts that are held in the WEB. You cannot copy and paste images etc into a web page when you are creating it. You will need to upload and embed it.

Weebly:

I have created an acount with Weebly and it seems to be very easy to operate. The idea of dragging pragraphs, photos, audio files and many other things seem easy and fun.  I haven't actually had enough time to add things to that website but I am planning to create a website in the future for the students, where I could add some things and the students could check it on regular basis, maybe for revision or extra learning material.