Blogs and Wikis in Education

1.) Before doing this search on blogs and wikis I was unaware of how popular they are in education today. There were many web pages and articles about the wikis and blogs that peaked my interest. One fifth grade classroom was using it as a way to keep up with current events. The teacher assigned them to find a current news story and summarize and cite it. After they were posted, they were able to look at their peers articles, so they automatically had a handful of about twenty five current events. Another great idea I found was schools from different areas or even states collaberating on one wiki to communicate about their school life. It would be neat for students to do it with a school from a different country eve,n just to see how everyday life differs from here the in states during a typical school day. Lastly, a teacher that was teaching students where english was their second language had them use the wiki or the blog as a way to practice technology in english. This way the teacher could go through and let them know how they were doing and make responses.

2) After learning a little more about RSS and aggregators I came to found that they could be useful in the classroom. For example, if the students were doing a project on current events (like the conflict in Iraq) they would be able to use the RSS to get notifications about updates on any news pages they marked. The students would need to pick pages accordingly because they would not want 100 new notifications a day; that could be overwhelming.

3) Although, I have just become familiar with wikis this school year, I have quickly discovered there are some good things and bad things about them. A problem that may arise is someone going in and deleting everything that is written by the student. Also, being on the internet anyone has access to it. As a teacher, you need to find a way to protect your students work on their wikis or blogs. A good thing about them is that it is a convienient way for teachers to access student work. They are able to ask their students to post any of their work and allows for teachers to not have to carry home loads of paper work. Lastly, it can help students connect to one another. A student can post something and have their peers proof read and give feed back.