Final Thoughts

I learned a lot from being in this Multimedia in Instruction class. There are so many tools that we investigated and used that I never heard of before. I was really excited to get more familiar with blogs. I heard of blogs but I never read any or used one. I am so happy that I now know the usefulness of blogs and how they can be used in the classroom. I know that I will be using blogging in my classroom. I think blogs are a great way for students to share their ideas with each other and others outside of the classroom. I also like the idea of using a blog to keep in touch with parents and the community. Blogs have so many uses and I think that they should be incorporated into curriculum more often.

Blogs were not the only tool that I was excited to learn about. All the other Web 2.0 tools were interesting to look at such as gliffy and wikispaces. I never knew that there were so many tools out there that teachers could use in the classroom. Especially so many free tools! I think it is great that there are programs that teachers can download for free to use in their classroom. It can be hard for teachers or schools to come up with money to spend on multimedia tools, so it is really helpful that teachers can get great educational programs for free.

I think one challenge that I may face with incorporating multimedia tools into my lessons is making sure that the technology is adding to the lesson or unit and not just there for a “wow” effect. It is extremely important that the students get something out of using the tools; they need to be appropriate and educational. I think it will be much more time consuming when putting technology into my lessons because I will have to spend time exploring the tools and making sure they will be beneficial for my students learning. However, even though incorporating multimedia tools may be a challenging time consuming process, it is well worth it. A well thought out lesson that uses multimedia tools can extremely beneficial for the students’ learning.

Another challenge I think I may have is keeping up to date on all the new tools. I never heard of many of the tools we talked about in class, so it just makes me think about how will I hear about any new tools after the class ends? I wonder if there is some sort of newsletter or magazine I could subscribe to that talk about all the new innovating educational technology. It would also be helpful to have workshops that talk about and show how to use new technology in the classroom.

I am extremely happy that I took a class that taught me about using multimedia in the classroom. I am taking away a lot of new and useful information about multimedia in classroom. I think every teacher should take a class or workshop about using new and exciting multimedia tools. I also believe that every school should make it possible for teachers to learn about these tools and help them with incorporating the tools into the curriculum. If used correctly multimedia tools can enrich learning.

What's In The News?

Educational Blogging

Laurel A Clyde. Teacher Librarian. Seattle: Feb 2005. Vol. 32, Iss. 3; pg. 43, 3 pgs

Summary:

The article “Educational Blogging” looks at the uses of educational blogs. Not only are blogs used for students but blogs are also helpful for teachers and the community. Some blogs are written by subject experts who provide teachers with useful information to share with their colleagues and students. Blogs can also be used to post announcements that parents and other members of the community can have access to. The article states that blogging “has the potential to motivate students, to build online collaboration, and enhance learning opportunities”. Blogging can promote literacy through dialog and storytelling and can provide prompt feedback for students and teachers. With using blogs, students can write about topics important to them and share their ideas with their peers. The article gives some great sources of different educational blogs that can be helpful for teachers. One website is http://educational.blogs.com/ which has links to different blogs teachers have created and links to blogs where teachers can communicate with each other and share ideas about curriculum topics. Another site that the article talks about is http://weblogg-ed.com/. This site also has different blogs that can be useful to teachers and students and has a link to http://edublogs.org/ where you can sign up and create your own educational blog. This article talks about all the wondrous aspects of blogs and how they should be noticed more in the classroom. Blogs need to start being supported by school libraries just how other tools are supported, because a good blog can be just as useful as a book.

Response:

I really enjoyed reading this article. I think blogs are a great tool to use in the classroom and this article reinforces their importance. I also really liked all the good links the article provided. I checked out a bunch of them and they had some really good information on them. I really liked http://edublogs.org/ and I signed up to make my own blog. I like this blog better than Blogger because its main purpose is for educational blogs. I would recommend others checking it out.

Questions:

Would it be better to have one main blog for all the students to post on, or should every student have their own blogs?

Would it be best to read over blogs before students post them, or let them post and then look over them?

Are their some rules and regulations that teachers need to follow when using blogs in the classroom? Such as should students use fake names and are their certain topics that shouldn’t be discussed?