Technology, technology...

In my previews blog I wrote about the changes that  technological advancements have brought and today I am going to talk particularly about two things- weblogs and RSS.

Nowadays most of the people have their own blogs. In blogs people share their ideas thought, whatever they find interesting. It is kind of a journal. Blogs can be used for different purposes and for teaching and learning purpose as well. As we know, kids get more motivated when they create their own web pages and design it the way they like. So why don’t we ask them to create blogs for learning purpose? This will be both fun and useful for them.

 It is useful because blogging has many advantages. First of all blogs give us the potential to help our kids to become network creators.  Blogging is not only intensive writing but also intensive reading, as you have to read a lot of things so as to know what to write about. Another advantage of a blog is that students will be more motivated to write for a real audience. Also, when the students will write something for a bigger audience it is more likely that they will be more cautious not to make mistakes and write correctly. Also, blogs may foster communication between the kids which will make studying fun for them. I think this a great tool which teachers should use in their classes.

Another interesting finding for me was RSS (Real Simple Syndication). With the help of RSS you can connect to other’s blogs without clicking on their blogs separately. Like you connect to a blog and get the new things the time they are published. It’s kind of a mailbox where you receive the new staff that you are interested in. this is a very helpful tool for us, students and teachers as well. Whenever we want to write about something we can subscribe to a blog which is about it and get the new staff without searching for it… RSS feeds may be very useful in classrooms as well. If a teacher uses blogs in his/her lessons, instead of going to his/her student’s blogs one by one, he/she can subscribe to their blogs and get all the new posts in one place.

I believe these tools may be very useful and helpful in the process of teaching and learning. I’ll use blogging in my classes for sure, but as for now, I don’t think that I am ready to present it to my students. In order to present something to students who have to be very proficient in it, unfortunately I am not that proficient in blogging yet. There are many dark sides where I have to spread light. Hopefully my exploration of blogging will be successful and I will be able to use them in my classes in future properly.