blogging
At the moment as well as doing the blogging4educators online blogging course I am also reading about blogs and looking at different educational blogs on the internet. In the past week or so I have learned quite a bit about blogging. I had no idea of what an RSS feed was- now I more or less know. I found a nice little video actually. I have learned a little about blogreaders (is that the right term??) as well, and coincidentally at the same time, started using myyahoo as my blog reader, and have started subscribing to other blogs- it makes life much easier! I have also discovered bloglines as well as numerous other sites. One of which is eatonweb which is a compilation of the blogs out there. I found this from one of Rebecca Blood’s articles on the history of blogging. This a quite interesting reading matter.
In the course of reading different articles in order to write my own, I have come up with a few newish ideas of how to use them in my spring semester class. I am thinking of making them compulsory again as I had made them the first time I used blogs in class, and making them assessable. The class actually didn’t like them being compulsory but then I didn’t really reward the students much in terms of grades for doing their blogs, this semester I have maybe 10 to a maximum of 20 marks that I can play with for the writing of blogs. I intend to make it clearer why I want to use blogs in the class, share the rationale more and spend more time in class introducing the concept of blogs as well as the technoology. I think it will be used more as a journal type thing but also as a community with students required to comment on others’ blogs. More on this later.
