Digital Tool Reflection: Webspaces: Blogs The nature of a blog is one where sharing, reflecting, commenting and evolving is at the core. It is a place where attitudes and beliefs are evident. A place where the blogger can express themselves. And I believe most certainly it can be a place of learning and educating. How perfect for the classroom! Blogging, as with all forms of ICTs, has developed and changed. And it will continue to do so. Just as ICTs will continue to change, so too will my pedagogy. I want to be; and I will be; my own take on a contemporary teacher and I always want to adjust, re-think, try, try, and try again. This will be how I will meet the needs of the contemporary learner. Because just as my values and beliefs will form the teacher I will be, so too will my learners come from their own realities, their own set of value systems and beliefs, their own experiences. It is without doubt that the contemporary learner has far higher technical skills than previous generations. The very nature of what keeps them interested and engaged has changed. While this aligns perfectly with ICTs in the classroom, it is not without negatives. I like the Hyde et al description of how today's student lives in a 'reset world' (Hyde, Carpenter, & Conway, 2014). This poses a huge challenge to teachers, because we cannot simply 'reset' what needs to be taught. We cannot 'reset' the curriculum. An exam cannot be 'reset'. But what we can modify is the technologies we use to teach and how we use them. This blogging business has been a steep learning curve for me the last three weeks. For a person that does not even use Facebook, I have honestly struggled. The anxiousness that I have felt with public sharing, albeit only to our professional student and staff GDLT body, has been constant. But just as I will ask my students to 'stretch' themselves, I have pushed through my comfort zone and am feeling more and more confident with each reflection on this blog-o-mine. (For a look at someone stretching themselves, Owen Wright, who fought back from brain injury to get back to surfing and take out the latest title at Snapper Rocks, is an amazing story of inspiration. See story here.) So let’s talk about the technical stuff. When I first set up this weebly blog, apart from being totally absorbed in the pretty set-up options, my first error was that I set up the first couple of pages as web format, not blog format. At the time, I perceived this as a mistake, however now as I reflect on week one, I see it as unintentional discovery of the added function of weebly. It can be web page and blog! Which is fabulous for the class setting, where stand-alone pages regarding assessment content for example, can sit unchangeable. Then the blog pages can be commented on and added to. Video, images and embedding is all done with click and drag and considering where I sit on the tech savvy spectrum, makes it pretty straight forward. I have even fairly easily managed linking to past pages / blogs quite easily. Not to say that I don't find weebly at times "clunky" in particular I found myself getting stuck with a particular text box that darned if I couldn't change the white text on white background! See here for the how-to for setting up a blog in weebly. For an added fee you can set up specifically for a classroom setting as explained here. It allows the teacher to determine the participants and the privacy settings. In my earlier reflection 3.1, I looked at a year 10 Civics and Citizenship class. However, on further investigation I found a far better unit of work for a blog learning experience on the QCAA senior Social and Community Studies. The particular unit of work according to the curriculum is "the world of work". See the unit detail here. The topic would be on industrial relations in Australia. The blog space would be about a workplace and each contributor would have a different role: employer, employee, apprentice, apprenticeship centre, Fair Work Australia. The students would research and detail the rights and responsibilities of each role. From there the options are endless: posing different scenarios such as unfair dismissal, recruitment, pay and conditions, rights and responsibilities are only a few examples. ![]() In my week two reflection, I discussed the higher end learning of Bloom's Taxonomy. Well in fact, the reverse Bloom's Taxonomy. See below: source: https://saraeffron.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/blooms-revised-taxonomy.jpg Using the revised version of Bloom's Taxonomy, that is the six 'doing words' of; remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating and creating, provides the framework for teachers to get the students to that higher end learning, which I am sure we all agree is the goal post. And I believe this is where we get to with the modification and redefinition stages of the SAMR model. See my SAMR for the project of the industrial relations blog as mentioned above: Substitution » Instead of hand written text, the students can now word process in their blog (or word doc first if prefer) and edit and save and work on copies. Students search the internet for information regarding industrial relations and their particular role in the workplace scenario. Augmentation » Unlike hand writing, students improve their work through the tools within the word processing program e.g. spelling, grammar check, thesaurus, word count. Images, video, researched documents and graphics are easily embedded within the blog. Students can email external sources for further information. Modification » The focus on collaboration through the virtual workspace is a major component. The virtual work world will be owned by the students. The students can comment with feedback. Being a webspace, the students can work on the project from home and are not limited by time constraints of the classroom. Redefinition » The teacher can collaborate with other classes in the area or even further afield. The class could collaborate with a class from an Asian country, as this is one of the key focus areas of the cross-curriculum priorities that we as teachers need to incorporate as per ACARA. (Read about that here.) And a final and most important matter is to discuss is ensuring the blogging is under the ethically, legally and safely umbrella. See the Queensland State Government site for cyber safety guidelines here. This is paramount. This reflects safety. In regard to copyright, as a teacher I need to be modelling this to my students. See smartcopying site regarding how to ensure this. This forms part of the legal and ethical considerations. We need to ensure that students understand appropriate referencing and the underpinning ethos behind it: just because it is online, it is still equivalent to theft if we do not source or reference properly. This task has been a great learning journey for me. I tried wiki, see blog 3.2. I see its place as a classroom ICT. But I love blogging and what that could bring to collaborative work, analysis and higher order thinking.
3 Comments
Gary Holmes
3/26/2017 01:39:10 am
Hi. Your first post has covered the required task criteria. Great start. Good use of hyperlinking to other sources of supporting evidence. I suggest you try embedding more visual resources to get your messages across. Also the next step is to ramp up your knowledge and understanding of the curriculum in your subject areas so you can discuss the complexity and depth required. Well done.
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Jess Rodgers
3/30/2017 12:32:05 am
Great info in here Belinda! Loved your ideas for class collab as part of SAMR model. Glad to hear the blogging is coming along comfortably now. :) Jess
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Kris
4/11/2017 05:16:17 pm
I enjoyed you discussion on Blogs. It seems like it will take time for most people and likely students to get to grips with it so that is an important for myself that I would need to think of what is the easiest way to explain to a student how create this so a video might come in handy. You have me thinking. I can see the use of a blog as a tool for giving homework questions and checking it on the blog and this incorporates the use of ICT. Students need to learn how to upload and embed so this would be another advantage Thanks for the insight :)
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Neil Gaiman // "I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
photo by Nitch / CC BY ![]() Ernest Hemingway // "Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive... You will be dead soon enough."
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