Ch 3, 5 & 7 Response

Ch 3

The fact that such a large amount of students are already using blogs in their personal lives outside the classroom shows that they have an interest in this tool, so having them use it for educational purposes is a great idea. I agree that teachers should try to manage a blog themselves before assigning their students to do so. I think that blogs would be a great way to facilitate classroom discussion outside the classroom, that they have time to think about and post and respond to each other by writing instead of speaking in a classroom setting. One problem I see with doing this in schools would be getting permission from all of the parents to be on a blog, as well as from the school. Most blogging websites are blocked in our public school district, so you would have to find one that is accessible. With younger children, you may have a problem with some parents allowing their children to browse blogs over the internet due to some content they may come across. I think the step-by-step instructions for creating a blog, updating it, and posting photos is very helpful and it would be good to give these instructions to students as a guide incase they run into any problems or have trouble with any of these components.

Ch 5

RSS, "Real Simple Syndication", allows you to consume all of the information that is constantly being updated and every-changing on the internet in a more efficient way. It checks your subscribed sites every hour for updates. As a result, you are able to check all of the updates for multiple sites at once, rather than checking each site separately many more times each for the same information. The chapter has detailed instructions on setting one up and using it. I had never heard of this before this class, and I think it could be a very useful tool. If you are teaching a certain subject matter, especially one on current events, and you want to keep up with all of the new developments, this would be a great tool to use in order to do that easily and efficiently. It would take less of your time to check all of the websites' updates at once, rather than having to go through all of your bookmarks and check updates on each one separately. Especially for blogging websites that are updated frequently, this would be an easy way to see which ones were updated and what the new information is, rather than going through the process of checking each one, only to find that some haven't been updated and you just wasted your time going to that site when you could have discovered this when looking at your RSS. I think this is a tool I may be able to make use of in my personal life, as well as keeping updated on information for a unit I am teaching.

Ch 7

I found this chapter, along with our in-class lesson on Flickr, to be very interesting and useful. I never thought about Flickr as being a tool that could be used for educational purposes, and I thought the class came up with some great ways to use it for a lesson or assessment. Many students learn better by seeing visuals, and using Flickr to show photos to go along with what you have been teaching may be very helpful to them. I really liked the idea mentioned on page 101 to use Flickr and GoogleEarth together for a lesson on geography. I think showing kids real images of a place is a way for it to really come to life and seem real, as opposed to an illustrated map. There are great instructions for incorporating Google Earth into Flickr on pages 104-105.

Flickr lessons can be something you project to the entire class and discuss together, or it can be an interactive tool that they use on their own for learning. They can browse the Flickr album individually and run their mouse over parts of the photo to read the notes you have left for them. This is a great way to highlight certain parts of the photo. You can also add comments to the photos, which is another way to make it interactive for students. Since most photos are tagged, you can have students search for certain photos. On page 106, it explains a virtual field trip lesson. You can have each student search for different photos from a particular place, with descriptions of what they are, and put them together as a presentation for the whole class to see. This is a very cool idea, and something I would like to do in my own classroom.

I really liked the ideas for using Flickr in the classroom, and it is one application I feel certain that I will make use of as an educator. I believe putting pictures with things is a great way to help students visualize and learn any subject.