Comparing the online spaces

Comparing and Contrasting: Blogs, wikis and websites

Differences: Blog	·         Web 2.0 tools	Differences: Wiki
·         Your own learning online space where people can comment on your ideas ·         Chronological	Similarities: Blog – Wiki – Website ·         Appeals and suits different learning styles ·         Enhances visual literacy ·         Encourages critical thinking skills ·         Encourage collaboration and authentic works ·         Link students to the world and other experts ·         Format their own pages ·         Can be accessed anytime, anywhere ·         Online spaces which relate to 21st Century learning ·         Maybe seen as distractions and time-consuming – to busy formatting the page	·         Anyone can edit the page ·         Web-based trust has to be established in order for wikis to be successful
Differences: Website
·         Static ·         No one can comment – not as interactive as a wiki or blog

Even though each online space has individual sets of tools and functions, they are similiar in the learning environment.  

Websites in my teaching context

SWOT analysis of Websites in my Teaching Context

Strengths	Weaknesses
·         Static and informative, no-one can change the content ·         Expert material ·         Reliability that content and research ideas are from the author students want ·         Instant and immediate resource ·         Students can upload what they want and know the content will be safe and secure	·         Not as interactive as blogs and wikis ·         Weebly Pro toolbar has to be paid for in order to use
Opportunities	Threats
·         Linking students to the world and the worlds experts and authors ·         Formatting pages to suit their presentation style for a particular audience. ·         Storing information which can be categorised, easily accessed and coherent. ·         Suit different learning styles and needs. Great way for teachers to gain insight into students’ cognitive style and how they like to learn. Are their pages visual? Are their pages text-based?	·         Copyright legislation ·         Security for students ·         Ethical and safe use of the website – students must understand that what is posted on the website can be seen by the world

Websites enable students to learn from expert material which cannot be changed, so there is reliability of research and ideas. By linking students to the world and guiding them through the world of web, they will be able to receive immediate and instant information and resources that may cater for development of ideas on their blogs or wikis. The uses of websites in a secondary school teaching context will be to source commendable and genuine sites for research and let students participate in creating them for instructional design and high order thinking.

Blogs in my teaching context

Blogs are a Web 2.0 digital tool and online space which allows students to personalise their work and gain ownership of their work. Within a blog you can share content and connect with other students to evaluate and analyse works. It is an online space which can cater for the new literacies of the 21^st Century, image, sound, text and film. It is a flexible space which is chronologically set out so others can easily identify the works and refer to the time in which they were made. They are interactive forums. Blogs are easy to use and allow for a range of content to be uploaded and for students to collaborate and communicate their ideas and comment on each others ideas for self-assessing. This tool is wonderful for demonstrating metacognitive skills and giving students the opportunity to reflect on their learning, where they can continually edit and revise their thoughts.

SWOT analysis on BLOGS in my Teaching Context

Strengths	Weaknesses
·         Motivates students to write more ·         The world can see it rather than the immediate group ·         Easy to access information, deadlines and internet links relating to a topic – all in one blog ·         Immediacy ·         Student feels apart of events and the learning process ·         Chronological ·         Connection – link with others to write and analyse ·         Equity – for the shy and the loud students to voice an opinion ·         Cost effective ·         Caters for the new literacies or as some say the revisiting visual and aural literacy ·         Linking to other websites ·         Great online space for a learning journey to occur and reflections to be prompted ·         Save work on the web, if personal computer is stolen or fails. It backs up information.	·         Privacy of work ·         Use as a personal social networking site where shallow, personal comments and observations are made rather than critical thinking. (My job would be to have scaffolding techniques in place to promote critical thinking around topic of discussion). ·         Negative comments of other students and teachers ·         Students unable to express true reflections and portrayals of work due to censorship of the traditional school setting ·         Teachers instigate the use of blogs rather than students piloting their development within blogs
Opportunities	Threats
·         New set of skills and attitudes towards learning ·         In class discussions ·         Can be used over the period of ones life. A constant medium for ideas and thoughts that cannot be changed by other authors but can be commented on ·         Encouragement to write      ·         Assessments and assignments	·         Copyright law ·         Negative representation of students ·         Entire world can see it, privacy rights ·         Cyberbulling ·         Profiles being misused ·         Harmful material used like violence, pornography and use of inappropriate language

Smartcopying recognised blogs as an asset for teachers to “display student works, provide commentary on class activities and upload material for students to access during class or at home for homework tasks” (Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2008, para. 3). Blogs give students the opportunity to obtain feedback from an academic expert and it is accessible to the world. I like the style of a journal blog because it is informal and not all in academic style which gives my fellow peers’ a quick and easy read, blogging resembles more and more a conversation but still engages the main ideas and concepts of the theories.

I also, found that using a journal style blog has been very rewarding in the fact that I can read others and make sure that I am on the right track with my own work. I can critique what others thought worked and what didn’t work for them.

The use of a blog in my teaching context will be a prosperous pedagogical advantage due to the fact that students can use them as journals and keep ideas and information in the one place which is easy to access and is formatted in an organised style which other students can comment on. Students can critically reflect, sustain topics over a period of time and engage in conversation which leads to further writing and complex thinking.

However “herein lies the dilemma for educators. What happens when a free-flowing medium such as blogging interacts with the more restrictive domains of the educational system? What happens when the necessary rules and boundaries of the system are imposed on students who are writing blogs, when grades are assigned in order to get students to write at all, and when posts are monitored to ensure that they don’t say the wrong things?” (Downes, 2004, para. 45). These questions are poignant and need to be developed because as Richardson notes that “I can’t let them do it passionately due to the inherent censorship that a high school served Weblog carries with it”³⁴  (Downes, 2004, para. 47).

This quote from Jay Cross summed up blogging for me “that 90 percent of our learning is informal, this is the sort of thing they mean: that the lessons we might expect to find in the classroom work their way, through alternative means, into our day-to-day activities … the process of reading online, engaging a community, and reflecting it online is a process of bringing life into learning” (Downes, 2004, para. 55).

References

Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth

Affairs. (2008). Smartcopying: The official guide to copyright issues for Australian schools and TAFE. Retrieved 5 April 2011 from: http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/scw/go/pid/945

Downes, S. (2004). Educational Blogging. Retrieved 5 April 2011 from:

http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume39/EducationalBlogging/157920

Interesting slide show from George Siemens

Haugesund

View more presentations from gsiemens

Wordle

Dipity: John Marsden

John Marsden on Dipity.

Dipity is an extremely creative tool which is easy to use and extremely engaging. I can see how students would love to create timelines in this format. Dipity allows for more interesting and innovative ideas to occur and allows you to explore outside the box of just Microsoft programmes, such as Excel or Word. The other idea that I love is that you can embed your ideas onto the web for everyone else to view and comment. Students would get a sense of pride towards their work and this helps them to see that doing the activities are useful and meaningful in a real-world context.

The learning purposes for the Dipity timeline, I created above, could be to get students to add to and create their own Dipity timeline by finding more information on the author of the book, what other books were in the series and why it was turned into a blockbuster movie?

SWOT analysis of Dipity in my Teaching Context

Strengths	Weaknesses
·         Embed onto the web ·         Timelines are engaging and can be used at the high order thinking end of the scale ·         Easy to use and create ·         Upload images, video, text and audio ·         Interactive – much more exciting then those boring history lessons where you had to jot down important events which you had to regurgitate in tests ·         Appealing to a range of learning styles ·         Can be used as a collaborative tool with other students ·         Develops research and with the incorporation of image and sound engages students to search further for information, and develop critical thinking skills	·         Students may just add dates and images, a remembering thinking strategy without using complex thinking skills ·         Carried away with formatting the timeline rather than adding relevant content
Opportunities	Threats
·         Freedom to format their own timeline ·         Freedom to express their own content ·         Creativity can prevail ·         Innovative ideas are introduced ·         Multimodal ways of expressing dates and text with image, video and audio	·         Copyright legislation

I would like to add to this posting the use of one other digital tool I researched this week:

Skype is another great digital tool to break down the walls of the classrooms and interact with overseas classrooms. One can have interviews with expert authors on the other side of the world.

Digital Tool: Online Concepting Mapping

Here is a PMI concept map evaluating the use of concept maps in a classroom context

PMI of Concept Maps in my teaching context

Pluses	Minuses	Interests
·         Organise ideas into chunks that can easily be indentified ·         Students can sort and filter relevant information ·         Each bubble can be connected to another bubble for critical thinking and analysis to occur ·         Easy to format and create ·         Supports visual literacy rather than just lists of ideas there is a structured format where the brain can process ideas more easily. You can see a concept as a whole and then read each bubble for more detailed information. The further the bubble is away from the centre of the concept map the more detailed and niche it becomes ·         Link to websites ·         Creativity prevails	·         Too big and loose, focus is lost for some students ·         Loosing depth in ideas, just stating ideas rather than evaluating and analysing ideas ·         May not suit all learning styles, sequential learners ·         Visually threatening to some students	·         Provides connections to the brain for easier absorption of ideas and schemas ·         Digital literacy is developed ·         Free flowing ideas, leads to unexpected findings ·         Malleable and flexible tool for all learning styles

Concept maps are easily constructed and created. You can present students with a concept map to give them a holistic, well-rounded view of a topic or ideas which they can refer back to if they are having difficulty relating and connecting with the project or assignment. They are visually appealing and students can create their own concept maps and upload them to wikis or their blogs for other students to see and comment on. I remember creating mind-maps in class on a piece of paper. It was a helpful process but once class was finished they were either thrown away or became damaged, so ideas were lost and you couldn’t refer back to them. Concept maps saved onto a computer allows students to constantly refer back to it. By the end of the activity or topic students can see and reflect on the ideas they had in their concept map; see if they understood them or where improvement was needed.