CEP 811: Online Experience

As I explored the resources and technologies I could see that many of them would be applicable to my future students and it made me look forward to trying them next year!  I think that most any class could adapt some of the online experience to their curriculum.

I am especially interested in Educational Blogs where students would have "a personal online journal that is frequently updates and intended for public consumption."

• Learning can happen anywhere a student has computer access
• Everyone can partipate even students who normally don't contribute to class discussions
• Students can build on learning by revisiting their beginning blogs and adding new understanding to them.
• Students would gain writing experience
• Encourages collaboration in the classroom
• Can involve people outside the school
• Students can use images to express themselves
• It can reduce the costs of printing and other supplies (journals, notebooks)

I would probably use a variety of pedagogical strategies with my students starting with direct instruction where I would show the students step-by-step how to use the blog.  Next I would use structured questions to get students used to blogging their thoughts, opinions and become familiar with the technology.  I would also model blogging by including students in my own blog and by responding to their blogs.  As we became more familiar with blogging I would have students become more reflective, have dialogues with other students and then invite responses from others outside the classroom.

I think some of the technologies that would be harder for my students to use are the RSS Feeds because many of them are poor readers and finding articles that would work for them would be challenging.  Podcasts and Videocasts would also be difficult because we do not have the equipment for audo or visual recordings.  Most of the other online experiences would work for us if we started out small and worked our way to their full capabilities.  Although my current students don't have a lot of computer experience I think they would enjoy learning about and interacting with these tools.