Readings for the Week
Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning is available here as a PDF. You can read it online or download it. (This weeks reading is pages 1-13) The URL for the Handbook is(http://www.umanitoba.ca/learning_technologies/cetl/HETL.pdf)
Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts (Richardson) Chapter 1: The Read/Write Web
You have already created a blog during our face to face meeting. Your assignment this week is to explore customizing the look of your blog and adding or removing some of the features. Adding an image, a video, or a link would be a good start. Below is a video reminder on how to add some of these features, and here is the Blogger help page to get started. (http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/topic.py?topic=12439)
There are many “gadgets” to add in a Blogger blog. Go ahead and add any you want, you can always remove them later. Your blog should reflect as best as possible the image of the content you are presenting. On a professional blog about education, a hangman game is probably not the kind of content you want on the page. A list of other educators’ blogs that you read might be a nice feature to add. Just because it might be an “academic” environment does not mean that it has to be dark and foreboding. It can reflect your personality and how you present your content face to face. If you are bright and cheery, use bright and cheery colors. Here is a video to help you get started.
ASSIGNMENTS
For this assignment, you will be modifying your blog page.
The writing assignment for this week is to write your personal “teaching philosophy” and add that as a blog post. When writing blog posts, use a word processor to write the post and then copy and paste the text into the blog. Take your time. You might add a link or two as references to support your ideas. That is very common for blog posts. Often it is a starting point for blogs.
Collaboration is an important component of an online course. With that in mind, it is critical that we interact with one another in the discussion board. To promote interaction, we can share our experiences here on this blog and comment on the individual blogs of our classmates.
Please use your experiences after creating a blog in our face-to-face meeting to answer the following questions below by typing in the field just below "Add New Comment" and don't forget to reply to a couple classmates! You will need to add your email address and name to post a comment. You can also add avatar, or image, by going to www.discus.com and creating a profile based on your email address.
In your answers to these questions you might consider your own experiences reviewing other blogs; how might you answer this week’s discussion questions?
- How can you see blogs being used in a F2F class as well as an online course?
- What are the benefits of using a blog over another medium?
- What are the challenges of using a blog in education?
