Making A Personal Grammar Guide

 Hello, Learners!

Welcome to Mrs. Lund's Connect Activity!


     For this activity, you will be making your own Grammar Guide. Consider it a cheat sheet for use in all of the writing you will do as you continue your education.

     To create your guide, you will make a document for your blog which contains:

• Frequently misspelled words
• Grammar uncertainties
• Punctuation and capitalization problems
• Source crediting conundrums

   These are to be items with which you commonly have difficulty.  For example, I would list in my personal grammar guide the word "privilege" because I constantly catch myself thinking of the "ledge" part of words like  "knowledge" and "ledger" when I run across this word.  Quite often I do not realize it until Spellchecker squiggles me!  I feel a bit less embarassed because I know that both "knowledge" and "privilege" are often cited as commonly misspelled words (Sebranek, Kemper, & Meyer, 2001, p. 485).

     Visit each of the sites listed and take at least one item from each site for your Grammar Guide.  Be sure to copy the URL and cite your sources! Organize your document using the bulleted items above as headings.  Number your items beneath each heading.  For each item, you will create an example of correct usage.   When you have finished your blog post, you will be critiquing three of your classmates' Grammar Guides. 
  
DETAILED DIRECTIONS FOR GRAMMAR GUIDE ENTRIES
Frequently Misspelled Words
     List five words with their correct and incorrect spelling.  The two sites below contain lists of commonly misspelled words.  Take at least one word from each of the two sites below.  Looking at the lists, you might be surprised by some words that you thought you were spelling correctly!  You will also need to write a sample sentence with the proper spelling for each of the five words you have selected.

Commonly Misspelled Words

More Commonly Misspelled Words

Punctuation and Capitalization Problems 
     List five punctuation rules that you don't know solidly, are unsure of, or frequently break.  One example would be the proper placement of  punctuation in a sentence with parentheses.  List the complete rule and a sample sentence with proper usage for all five.
Here is a list of topics concerning punctuation:  Spacing after punctuation marks, Periods, Commas, Semicolons, Colons, Dashes, Quotation Marks, Double or Single Quotation Marks, Apostrophes, Italics, Ellipses, Question Marks, Exclamation Points, Parentheses, Brackets, and Slashes.  Here are topics in capitalization:  Words beginning a sentence, Major words in titles and headings, Proper nouns and trade names, Nouns followed by numerals or letters, Titles of tests, Names of factors, variables and effects (APA, 2010, p. vii).

Grammar Uncertainties
     Find five points of grammar that you didn't know or have trouble with.  Subject-verb agreement is an example (Sebranek, Kemper, & Meyer, 1999, p. 88).  List and explain the point of grammar then write a sentence demonstrating the correct usage for each situation. (The first link below discusses grammar only.  The next three discuss both grammar and punctuation.)  Here are some topics in grammar: Verb tenses, Prepositions, Transitive & intransitive verbs, Adverbs, Adjectives, Possessive nouns, Possessive Adjectives, Subject & verb agreement, Irregular verbs, and Conjunctions (Sebranek, Kemper, & Meyer, 2001, pp. 501-528).

Intermediate Level English

Grammar Rules

Grammar Book

Rules of Writing

Crediting Sources
     Next, you will tackle crediting sources. As nearly everything you find published (whether on the Internet or in print), is copyrighted, (either by law or by umbrella rules), you must be careful to avoid plagiarism. Find five rules for citing sources. List and explain each rule. Write a sample citation or appropriate entry demonstrating the proper method of citation. The two links below will take you to sites with information on crediting sources.  These are of few of the many topics in citing sources:  Parenthetical references, One author, Two or three authors, Corporate authors, Reference material, Indirect sources, Literary works, Abbreviations, Government publications, Periodicals, Television or radio programs, Film, Lectures, Web sites, Online government documents, and Online journals.


Citing Sources

APA Formatting & Style Guide - Citations


     When you have finished, you should have an organized, usable tool tailored to your own writing needs.  Good luck! 


References
Sebranek, P., Kemper, D., & Meyer, V. (1999).WRITE SOURCE 2000:  A Guide to WRITING, THINKING, and      LEARNING. Wilmington, MA: Great Source Education Group, Inc.

Sebranek, P., Kemper, D., & Meyer, V. (2001). WRITERS INC: A Student Handbook for WRITING and LEARNING.  Wilmington, MA:  Great source Education Group.

Vandenbos, G.R. (Ed.). (2010). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th Ed). Washington, DC:  American Psychological Association.

Do-type Activity: Figurative Language Devices - definitions & quiz

http://home.comcast.net/~kllund/EDU652-%20DoActivity/player.html

Understanding Active and Passive Voice in Writing

http://home.comcast.net/~kllund/EDU652-AbsorbActivity/player.html

Benefits of Blogging in Education - Discussion Post - EDU652

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ARxsCoP0E5weZGdtZ2ZmYzRfN2d2eHZrd2N0&hl=en

Understanding Active and Passive Voice in Writing

Click on this link for the narration text for my PowerPoint Presentation on Understanding Active and Passive Voice in Writing:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ARxsCoP0E5weZGdtZ2ZmYzRfNjM0cjRoOGNz&hl=en

Reflections on Technology for Teaching and Learning with Technology

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ARxsCoP0E5weZGdtZ2ZmYzRfNWZqZnEzajY1&hl=en

Week Six: Piaget Discussion and Course Reflection

     The word “monolithic” means “in the form of a large stone block” or “large and unchanging” (Encarta). The latter definition would appear to be the meaning intended for this discussion. While unwieldy and bogged down in tradition, our educational system has never been completely static. The physical buildings and classrooms have changed as our society has changed. I’m almost certain that every classroom has electric lights and paper and pencils as opposed to kerosene lanterns and slates. Advances in technology are not enjoyed equally by all schools though. The same holds true for the learning tools in schools. Some schools are embracing Learning 2.0 (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 28) while others are still lacking in the most basic computer equipment. The problem, however, is not the physical trappings of education. It is the direction of teaching. We have been teaching knowledge instead of teaching ways to acquire knowledge.
     According to the popular 2007 “Shift Happens” video by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, “The amount of technical information is doubling every 2 years. By 2010, it’s predicted to double every 72 hours.” In the 2008 remake of that video, “It is estimated that 4 exabytes (4.0X10^19) of unique information will be generated this year. That’s more than in the previous 5,000 years.”
     Instead of the knowledge acquisition model, with the student receiving knowledge from the educator, we need to embrace social learning (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18) and the idea of becoming lifelong learners. Fisch and McLeod state that, “We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist…in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet” (2007). There is still room for the lecture. However, the lecture can be a video-blog by an expert in the field used as a jumping-off place for lively discussion (social) and hands-on learning (Bowen as quoted in Young, 2009).
     Will Richardson says, “teachers need to find ways to use these tools to move away from the more traditional paradigms of instruction on their own terms in their own ways and recruit others to follow suit” (2009, p. 137). I liked the quote from Albert Einstein that the Fisch & McLeod video used, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”



References


Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). Minds on fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE, January/February.


Fisch, K. & McLeod, S. (2007) “Shift Happens” Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U


Fisch, K. & McLeod, S. (2008) “Shift Happens” Newly Revised Edition. Globalization & the Information Age. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8


Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.


Young, Jeffrey R., (2009, July 20). When Computers Leave the Class, so does Boredom. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/

Week Five - Class Critiques, Delicious, Social Networking Papers

Week Five started out with a bang - or was that a crash?  There was a major problem with this assignment. We were supposed to send out a mass email (with the links to our Wiki, Ning, and Facebook groups) to all of our classmates through Blackboard's Communication section. Unfortunately, when setting up in Blackboard upon entering this Master's program, almost all of our classmates used the privacy settings to hide their email addresses! One of my classmates was really on the ball and discovered this problem with the Roster early in the week. She posted it in the Question & Answer forum. As far as I can tell, only a handful followed her directions and changed their settings. In total, I was able to acquire only about twelve of the twenty email addresses needed before the deadline.
      Many students had trouble with sending only the link to Facebook in general instead of the link to the page containing their group. The impact of all of these problems is that those of us attempting to turn our work in on time had only a handful of selections to choose from as we tried to provide feedback on 3 each (nine total) of our classmates' wikis, nings, and Facebook groups.  This means that only a few people will receive the benefit of their classmates' feedback. 
     The Student Reflection was on a rather loosely thrown together article from a USA Today reporter with the titillating title of, "Scientists ask:  Is technology rewiring our brains?"  The article quoted very few actual facts, only a few studies, and, from the "experts," only "suggestions" not actual findings. The premise was that students are different today than they were twenty years ago because of electronic games and the Internet. A further premise was that children are not learning or are forgetting the necessary social skills for dealing with people face-to-face.  My response to the article is found here in a separate document.
     We were instructed to open a Delicious account.  I already did that in Week One so I just needed to refine it a bit according to the directions given.  It seems that it will be a very helpful tool for organizing and retrieving bookmarks.  I am certain it will be of tremendous help in research.  Will Richardson, in our text, mentions how we used to search for information in a library or an Internet search site then makes the case for social bookmarking:
     But today, when we now have the power to organize vast libaries of information on our own, the process is being run by millions of amateurs with no real training in classification.  Not to worry, however, because as with many topics on the new Net, users of social bookmarking systems have created a new concept to deal with the change:  the process is no longer taxonomy but "folksonomy."  The idea is that in working with your community of researchers, new tagging systems will emerge and become accepted that will allow us all to participate in the process.  Although this might seem as chaotic and not effective as
traditional methods, by being able to apply many tags to one particular link, we get the added potential of  seeing how others might interpret or use resources that we share.  Thus we get connected to information  in ways that traditional libraries cannot duplicate.  And the more people contribute in the creation of
folsonomies, the more valuable they become to all who participate (2009, p. 90).
On a personal note, this will now make it possible for me to actually be able to organize and easily retrieve the over three hundred ungrouped bookmarks that I have accumulated in just a couple of years - hooray! 

Letter of Request
This assignment was interesting.  It made me put my knowledge into words.  We were instructed to write a fictitious letter to our principal/boss asking permission to use a social networking tool in our class/training. 

Critical Thinking Exercise
This assignment was basically designed to make us read two chapters from Richardson.  The questions required answers that pretty much had to be paraphrases or direct quotes.  That makes for a lot of in-text citations.  The instructions said a "1-2 page paper" but it would have taken that much (double-spaced) just to write down all of the questions or lead-ins from them!  I ended up with 7 pages in the body.  There were about twelve questions.  We'll see what happens. 
  
Reference
Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

Scientists ask: Is technology rewiring our brains? USA Today. (11/10/2009). Retrieved from http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Scie4ntists+ask%3A+Is+...

"Minds on Fire" Critical Thinking Response Assignment - Week Four

Minds on Fire Response

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, in the article, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0,” discuss the evolution of education as a result of “massive improvements in transportation and communication” (2008, p. 17).

“Flat World” Implications

According to Brown and Adler, the educational implications of Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” are:

 

 Every place has the potential to become globally connected and competitive 

• The places that are globally connected are the ones with a well-educated workforce with skills that are in demand 
• To remain competitive, that workforce must also be learning and creating new ideas and skills (2008, p. 17-18)

Initiatives

 

There have been efforts introduced to deal with this demand for continuous and evolving education. Three of these efforts are the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement, MIT’s Open Courseware (OCW) initiative, and the Terra Incognita virtual project based in Queensland. A present-day implication of these efforts is, according to Brown and Adler, a new “culture of sharing, one in which content is freely contributed and distributed with few restrictions or costs (2008, p. 18). An impact we will be seeing developed fully in the future is the focus on social learning. Richard J. Light (2001) found that “students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own” (as cited in Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18). This demonstrates a change in focus from knowledge transfer (the Cartesian view) to the “learning activities and human interactions around which that content is situated” (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18). Three of the benefits of group learning are: 

• Clarifying meaning by asking questions
• Receiving the information by auditory means through discussion
• Learning by teaching others (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 18)

Professional Learning Communities

 

Brown and Adler state correctly that professional learning communities will be the next major frontier in education. It has already begun. Through the Internet, professionals have begun interacting with students in countless ways from an author’s commenting on a student blog about his/her book (see “Trainer-Expert Collaboration” in Shank, 2007, p, 150) to the “collaborative projects between students and expert astronomers” in the Faulkes Telescope Project (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 24).

 

Learning 2.0

 

The Internet has changed the way students learn. There is so much course material available online that a student can “find and join niche communities where they can benefit from the opportunities for distributed cognitive apprenticeship” (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 28). Instead of just learning “deep knowledge,” students can join a learning community and “participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning “(Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 28). As Brown & Adler say, when differentiating this “learning to be” from simply “learning about,” these (learning) “communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning - Learning 2.0 - which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners (2008, p. 28).

 

Equality Issue

 

It is to be hoped that someday the freedoms we cherish in this country will be common to all citizens of the planet. Access to high-speed Internet (and thereby all available knowledge) may very well become one of the essential freedoms assigned to every human being. A student without convenient, free access to a computer and the Internet is at a tremendous disadvantage. Such a student is effectively shut out of Learning 2.0. In the footnotes to the article, “Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0,” Brown and Adler state:

 

R. Natarajan, the former director of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, recently noted that “the half-life of knowledge” in many technical areas is now less than four years. If this is true, then 50 percent of what students learn as undergraduates will be obsolete by the time they graduate and begin seeking employment (Adler, 2007, n.p. as cited in Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 32).

 

Not only will that student be left behind in current education, but that adult will also be unprepared for the lifelong learning that will be the model of the future.

 

Conclusion

 

It is not possible to build the major university each week that Sir John Daniel mentioned in 1996 (Brown & Adler, 2008, p. 17). It is, however, quite possible that the 4-year undergraduate institutions that we see today will no longer exist in the future. With knowledge changing constantly, it would be more likely that we will instead see credentials of acquired competence, which will be as fluid as the subject matter itself.

 

References

 

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE, January/February.

 

Shank, P. (Ed). (2007). The Online Learning Idea Book: 95 Proven Ways to Enhance Technology-Based and Blended Learning. San Francisco: Wiley & Sons.

 

Week Four

     Week Four gave me what I've been wanting in this program - an introduction to course design.
Building on the accounts opened in the previous week, I created a fictitious APEnglish class story creation project.  Links to those classes are on the sidebar.

      The most useful tool is the wiki on PBWorks.  It was much easier than I had feared it would be.  Eight years ago, while attending classes for a Master's in Education, I was instructed to build a webpage.  The number of steps required to make even the simplest page was unbelievable by today's standards.  All it took was a simple click on a button and typing in the name of the page to create a page.  One more click made a link to return to the original page.  Amazing.  I was able to make a home page with instructions to the student and separate pages for each assignment to take the small groups from choosing a topic and brainstorming the characters and setting all of the way to posting the finished product for peer review and then for public view on the web.  I learned how to download photos, clip-art, themes, and even videos to the wiki. 

     The Ning class was the easiest to set up, but probably not the most useful. It didn't have the versatility in terms of setting up different pages as the wiki.  It would be wonderful for blogging and for a discussion board tool.  The themes for the site were rich and well-designed.  A very nice feature is the photo slideshow capability. 
    
     The Facebook page was, well, not as versatile as the wiki or as eye-catching and intuitive as the Ning.  It is possible to make the group secret, by invitation only, which alleviates some of the security concerns presented by Facebook's more open features. 

     The "Minds on Fire" critical thinking exercise on the article of the same name by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler (2008) was a thought-provoking look at the future of education and learning in general.  My response to the listed questions will be included as a separate document. 

Reference

Brown, J.S. & Adler, R.P. (2008). Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE, January/February.

Week Three: Facebook Privacy & Applications; Ning

Week Three saw some passionate discussions!

Discussion One: Facebook Privacy
The issue of Facebook privacy and the teacher who was fired for a thoughtless post to a Friend on Facebook brought out vehemence and strong statements of opinion and values. The general consensus was that the teacher was foolish,unprofessional, and naive. The school system was harsh, probably because of the public eye (it was a television expose piece on educators using Facebook). However, the school system had no policies covering internet social networking systems, so I believe that the teacher's lawyer will probably see her reinstated...if she wishes to go back there. The lesson for all educators is that the Internet is not private. No one should post anything they wouldn't put in front of someone they respect whose opinion matters (some suggested a pastor). Many classmates addressed the fact that, as educators, we are held up as role models even in our private lives - fair or unfair as that may seem. We are public figures. Some addressed the issue of an employer determining what we do in our private time.

Only one or two touched upon it, but I really feel that everyone needs to use good judgment in our conduct - public and private. We tend to become lazy in the way we speak and act around those we consider friends or Friends. Good manners, courtesy, self-control, and self-discipline went out of style or at least favor in the Seventies. We need to go back to a more formal time in which we show more respect to one another...without all of the chauvinism, racism, and class schisms this time!

Discussion Post Two:  Facebook Applications
The second Discussion Post covered our exploration into Facebook applications. As I shamefacedly admitted in a response, I have become so rabidly against reading sidebar ads that I had not examined closely the Facebook page as it has evolved over the last year and a half that I have had an account. I never looked a the tab marked "Facebook Applications." Upon being invited to participate in a game, and receiving a request to allow the application access to my profile information, I immediately Canceled and have Ignored all subsequent requests. When following my assignment instructions, I looked at the applications then Browsed the entire list of applications.

What I found changed my mind altogether. It is not simply a list of time-wasting games and frivolous "look at me" venues. There are a great number of educational and worthwhile social applications available there. I critiqued "I Remember,"Visual Bookshelf," and "Cities I've Visited." The application not found there that I proposed is one for a Grammar Question Board with a grammar game as well. There are many word games out there but none for proper grammar - one of my passions.

Learning Activity:  Ning Account

The Learning Activity for this week was to create a Ning account and explore it's application to education or business. I had already created a Ning account during our Week One exploration of learning tools. The topic-centered social network group I created was "Elephant Statue Lovers." I created another group for this class and worked on the page a little. There will be more development in Week 4's Learning Activity. Finally, I found where the Wiki begun last week was mentioned again. We are to "build upon (our) Ning, Facebook, and PBWorks acounts by building (our) own Ning class, (our own)Facebook class, and (our own) PBWork class. I expect to see many questions in the Questions About the Course forum on the Discussion Board as that sentence in the instructions gives very little information about the expectations for the "Class" we are to create.

What I Learned
 I learned that there is a lot more to Facebook than I'd assumed.  I am learning how to make a web-course on PBWorks.  It's fun stuff and exactly what I'd hoped to learn from this program.  There is so much out there!  It's overwhelming. 

As per usual in this course, I'm full of doubts and concerns as to exactly what to do (in the Learning Activity for Week 4).  Truly wish there were more instructional support, a more visible pedagogical agent!  Knowing that our instructor is "there" for us doesn't help much when our questions elicit only responses that are brief & cryptic to the point of appearing computer-generated. (You will do this...").
I'm starting to wonder if the instructors aren't encouraged to do it that way - the test the course's ability to run itself.  Wouldn't it be awesome to be greeted at graduation with the information that our classes were administered by an AI?!  You never know.....! 

Wiki Week in Technology for Teaching & Learning with Technology

Remember the old Chinese Proverb, "May you live in interesting times"?   Well, this has been another interesting week.  Felt like the ground was wobbling beneath me until about halfway through. Week 2 of the course was devoted to reading and thinking "critically about relevant technologies related to online collaboration" and exploring and designing "learning activities using relevant technologies" (EDU651 assignment text).

For the first discussion post, we read from the West text the chapters on creating wikis for education.  We were to discuss the possible pitfalls of using wikis for education.   It seems to me that all of the pitfalls mentioned can be avoided through scrupulous planning and design of the wiki and preparation of the learners.  The West book has excellent advice for each of those requirements.

For the second discussion post, we read from the West book again in the chapters relating to three main types of educational wikis for:  Knowledge Construction, Critical Thinking, and Contextual Application.  For each category of wiki, eight ideas for wikis were described (for example, under wikis for Knowledge Construction, development of a Historical Timeline wiki was explained).  The assignment was to describe a wiki we might design in each of the three categories, choosing one to use as our larger project in this course.

The Learning Activities for this week were setting up a blog, a Tweeting account, and a wiki.  The wiki created will incorporate the idea chosen in the second post for the wiki assignment. Very confused as to this assignment as I do not see any reference to its completion/due date/ scoring, etc. beyond the task to choose one and  these words in the Week 2 instructions, "Once your wiki is created, you will start developing a learning activity that takes full advantage of the wiki capability.  It's completion will be in Week 4." The Week 4 Overview does not mention this at all, not even in the "point value" section. Clear as mud!  It seems that we are destined to muddle  through these assignments without enlightenment. I feel like Grasshopper asking, "Is this a test, Master?"

As for what I actually learned this week...

Wikis are far more than I realized.  They take blogging a giant step onward from publishing into collaboration and collaborative publishing. After reading the statistics in the Richardson text, my respect for Wikipedia rose prodigiously.  Especially telling is this quote from Richardson (2009, p. 56), "So when mistakes occur or vandals strike, the collaborative efforts of the group set it straight, usually very quickly.  University of Buffalo Professor Alex Halavais tested this by creating thirteen errors on various posts on Wikipedia, all of which were fixed within a couple of hours (Halavais 2004)."

I was delighted to finally be able to master uploading some of my Word documents to my blog.  It was very easy to get started on Twitter and fascinating to start the Wiki.  I will be doing a wiki assignment for a theoretical high school APEnglish class to create stories with each small group working in a different genre. There is a lot of work to be done there.  I was pretty tickled when I managed to make a few pages and make them link back to the home page.  That was such a nightmare eight or nine years ago when I first created a webpage for a graduate class at Mt. St Mary's.  Each page was about fifteen steps back then.  This is incredibly simple by comparison.

I signed up to take the PBWorks webinar next Wednesday on wiki development basics.  I didn't see any clear and easy way to build a sidebar on the page.  Hoping to learn that and other button tips.  Need to work on content as well.  If Moodle is truly free (as I have heard), I might try to find a way to have a discussion thread in the wiki project.  

The two texts for the class are:

West, James A. & West, Margaret L. (2009). Using Wikis for Online Collaboration:  the Power of the Read-Write Web by James West and Margaret West. San Francisco:  John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

 Richardson, Will (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California:  Corwin Press.

The Web, Blogs, and Wikis, According to Will Richardson

Click to View Document

2009 Horizon Report SWOT analysis

Click to View Document

BLOGGING AS TECHNOLOGY

Contents:

•Why blog?
•Blogs as learning technology
•Blogging Sites for Educators
•Step-by-Step Instructions
•References

Why Blog?

Blogging is a valuable tool, not only for students, but also for teachers and administrators in their efforts to make changes in education.

“Blogging has made it possible for all of us to be publishers and to elevate our voices to improve classroom practice.”(B. Ferriter, 2009)

“In every content area and grade level and in schools of varying sizes and from different geographic locations, educators are actively reflecting on instruction, challenging assumptions, questioning policies, offering advice, designing solutions, and learning together. And all this collective knowledge is readily available for free.”( Ferriter, B. Teaching with Blogs and Wikis Educational Leadership 66(5), 34-38.)

Blogs as Learning Technology
Blogging is a way to:

• Keep teachers current on methods and technology
• Help teachers collaborate with other professional educators
• Use feed readers to explore collections of student blogs
• Organize resources on topics connected to our curriculum
• Write a classroom blog reflecting on current events
• Have students challenge their digital peers and respond to challenges to their own electronic thinking

According to Peter Duffy and Axel Bruns (2006), Blogs:

• Help create connections that were previously very difficult or impossible
• Help to provide new channels of information and knowledge
• Promote the use of technology
• Promote writing habits
• Promote reading habits

Within a pedagogical perspective a blog can support:

• Comments based on literature readings and student responses
• A collaborative space for students to act as reviewers for course-related materials
• Images and reflections related to industry placement
• An online gallery space for review of works
• Writings, etc. in progress, making use especially of the commenting feature
• Teachers encouraging reactions, reflections and ideas by commenting on their students’ blogs
• Development of a student portfolio of work(Duffy, Peter, & Bruns 2006)

The Home Page at EduBlogs lists these ways to use blogs to teach how to:

1. Post materials and resources
2. Host online discussions
3. Create a class publication
4. Replace your newsletter
5. Get your students blogging
6. Share your lesson plans
7. Integrate multimedia of all descriptions
8. Organize, organize, organize
9. Get feedback
10. Create a fully functional website
(http://edublogs.org/10-ways-to-use-your-edublog-to-teach/)

Blogging Sites for Educators

• www.blogger.com –free and provided by Google, only one username and password needed for all Google services

• www.edublogs.org – free and meant for educators

• www.typepad.com – not free but has good technical help and file storage (see video tour at http://www.typepad.com/pro/index-2.html)


STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS FOR SETTING UP A BLOG:

• Paste in: http://www.blogger.com to your browser.
• If you don’t already have a Google account, create one.
• It will ask you to provide your email address and a password.
• You will need to go to your email account and wait (just a few minutes) for an account verification message.
• Once the confirmation arrives, read it and click on the link in the message. That will return you to the blogger website.
• It should have already signed in for you. If not, use your email address and the password you just set up to sign in.
• In the upper right-hand corner, you will see a blue link entitled “Create a Blog”. Click on that.
• You will need to select a name for your blog. This will be on your published blog, your dashboard, and in your profile
• Now you can choose a URL (Universal Resource Locator) for your blog
Sample: http://herdingmonkeys- teachingforlife.blogspot.com

There are two buttons beneath this section. The right-hand one (“Learn More”) tells you that the hyphen (-) is the only symbol that may be used in your URL (no underlines, spaces, or punctuation. The left-hand button (Check Availability) allows you to see if your URL has already been taken by someone else.
• Next you will need to type in the strange-looking letters that you see in the Word Verification box (Captcha). This tells Blogger that you aren’t a spam.
• Now you have created your own blog space. You will be given the choice of a theme, which means the layout and font. You can customize these later.
• Click on “Preview” below the box of a theme to see how it looks
• When you decide on one, fill in the circle below it with a dot by clicking it.
• Then click on “CONTINUE”
• There will be a small textbox for the title of your blog
• Below that, there is a larger textbox where you can type in your blog – with similar buttons to most word processing software.
• You will see a number of options around the page – experiment a bit to get comfortable.
• Type in a title and then whatever you want in the larger textbox then hit the button marked “Publish Post”
• Now you will see the message: “View Post”
• Click on that to see your completed post
• There are options along the top and side toolbars for moving between blogs, making a new post, customizing, and exiting

“Blogs and wikis are changing who we are as learners, preparing us for a future driven by peer production and networked learning.“ (B. Ferriter, 2009)

REFERENCES

Duffy, Peter and Bruns, Axel (2006) The Use of Blogs,Wikis and RSS in Education: A conversation of Possibilities. In Proceedings Online Learning and Teaching Conference 2006, pages pp. 31-38, Brisbane.

Retrieved August 1, 2009 from http://eprints.qut.edu.au Ferriter, B. (2009).

”Ferriter, B. Teaching with Blogs and Wikis" Educational Leadership 66(5), 34-38.

Home Page of Edublogs, “10 Ways to use Your Edu-blogs to teach." http://edublogs.org/10-ways-to-use-your-edublog-to-teach/

Teaching with Technology: an Introduction to Video Blogging

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