Blogs in the Classroom

I think Blogs have great potential for student use in the classroom as long as they are being used appropriately. Using a constructivist approach to learning and focusing on inquiry based strategies would be a great use of a blog. If a student poses a question they are curious and motivated to learn about it would be a great forum for additional input from a community of peers. This would be a great place to share links and gather information with others to help answer the question posed. It allows students a great platform for project based learning where they can explore real world context and problems and get expert opinions to develop solutions with a community of other learners.

I don't think blogs are designed for the more traditional methods of teaching where the teacher needs to be the "sage on the stage". Deductive teaching and even even inductive teaching methods would be better served in another format.

I think in the science area a great use of blogs would be to use them when developing a hypothesis for a science experiment or project the students would like to conduct. They could fine-tune their question and develop a method and answers to the questions in a community.

I do think that blogs could be used at times for other subjects that we may not see as applicable at first. If we really use our imaginations blogs can come in handy in other ways. I think they are a great source for the pursuit of the "why" behind lots of things. It isn't a place to practice math facts but it is a good place to help understand your math facts. For example, let's say a student doesn't understand why you can simplify fractions and still have the same value you started with even though there are different numbers. If they posed this questions to others on their blog sight it would be great for them to get responses from peers that understand it and can communicate it in a way for them to understand. Someone might also blog a link to help them better understand etc.. It allows a dialogue between students and experts that have common interests. We just need to be careful not to force a square peg into a round hole just because we can.

Lovin' The Wiki Thing!

Until about two hours ago I really thought Wiki's were just encyclopedias online. I did not know that you could create your own and use them as tools in your classroom so others could edit and organize them as well. This is a great idea! I have started my own Wiki to use with students when they do the WebQuest I am creating: http://fractiongameproject.wikispaces.com/


I went to Wikipedia and found my daughter's school district. It was very easy to go into the notes section on this page and add a comment. I just wrote 'Royal Oak has consolidated many schools in the past few years'.
The first window is a screen shot of the edit page and the second shot shows it saved and inserted in the notes section. This was surprisingly easy to do. I see how it could become a problem if people took all the information from this site as accurate because anyone can change things!