Chs. 1-3 of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts

Here we begin our journey through Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Wow that’s a mouthful. The first three chapters focus on the blogging world. Before I ever picked up a book about blogs, I was a blogger. To be honest, I’m really sick of these books telling everyone what blogging really is. Nothing really is concrete in this world anymore; everything evolves and morphs with time. So my mindless journaling online IS blogging, and I won’t let a text tell me otherwise. It may not be academic or scholarly blogging but it is a weblog. For Pete’s sake, blogging use to be listing websites you had visited.

Now that I got that out of my system, I can focus more on what each chapter had to offer about the blogosphere. Chapter one introduced us to the read/write web. Once upon a time, the web was a read only sort of atmosphere with little civilian interaction. Hard to believe since nowadays the web is giant publishing industry where millions of people litter their thoughts, ideas, opinions, and facts. With this being said, the chapter discusses the impact the read/write web has had on society, journalism, and education and how it will continue to affect various areas in our lives as technology and the web continue to grow and change.

Chapter 2 focuses on the pedagogy and practice of weblogging. The chapter gave many helpful insights on how to implement a blog in the classroom and the benefits of doing so. I like that specific examples of educational blogs were used and actually be checked out online. It’s one thing to read about a blog versus actually exploring one. I like that the author is straightforward about presenting the facts, as opposed to Collins and Halverson who I feel use a cynical view on education to scare you into technology usage, which really doesn’t work for me. The 6 reasons they provided for the use of blogging were:

1. Constructivist tool for learning-create content that others benefit from
2. Expand walls of the classroom-global connection
3. Archive learning-documentation
4. Supports different learning styles-promotes students voice
5. Enhance subject expertise-topic based blogs
6. New literacy skills-Research, reflect, organize, and synthesize

The chapter goes onto explain various ways to use blogs across the curriculum including in math and elementary classes, providing real blog links as evidence. But my favorite is when they list the English standards so that you can see how blogs fit right into 12 standards.

So chapter 3 basically helps you understand the process of setting up a blog with various software providers and hosts. They also take a few paragraphs to point out the risks and the safety precautions an educator needs to address when using a blog in the classroom. Then, they suggest blogger.com and take you step-by-step through the process of creating a blog post and the different ways you can photos and links to your blog.

Basically I’ve been beat over the head with blogs and I have developed a distaste for them, but the fact of the matter is that they are very useful, especially when it comes to a language classroom, so as a future educator, I know I will use them in my classroom, I just won’t overdo them so that my students hate it.