Blog and Wiki Posts

1. Identify and describe 3 interesting/innovative ways blogs and/or wikis are being used in K-12 classrooms.


2. Describe how you might use RSS readers/aggregators within a classroom setting.


3. Describe at least 2 pros and 2 cons of using blogs and wikis in education.

One creative way to apply blogs into classroom is having students create their own, secure blogs just for the classroom. This classroom blog will allow the students to express their feelings about projects, school, life, homework, and allow them to ask questions virtually to one another and to the techer. Classroom blogs will allow the teacher to post discussion questions, project ideas, reminders and other important information for the classroom. Then the blog can be accessed at home and will be a good organizational tool to help students know what is going on.

You can create a blog that archives favorite recipes of each student. To practice math skills, ask students to multiply each recipe so that it would feed the entire class! Post resulting recipes in blog.

The third idea is create a blog where students describe a typical day at school. Invite other same aged students from different global locations to contribute the same type of information on the same blog. Let students ask questions and leave comments to gain cultural awareness. Students can then begin to share/compare thematic units being learned, novels being read, field trips being taken, etc.

One way I would use RSS is allowing my students the access of updated feeds, especially if they were doing a research project. If they were studying about pollution in China the RSS feed could be created by a student and it will bring any updated news that was just published.

Another interesting way to incorporate RSS/ Aggregators into classroom was discussed by Will Richardson on his blog. He describes on his blog, “If you want to create a feed for what’s in the daily news about a particular topic, you can make a syndicated feed of search results of Google News. Just take the following feed address and add your search terms where indicated. http://voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php?num=50&q=your+terms+here So, for instance, if you want to have a feed for the search term “journalism and weblog” it would look like http://voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php?num=50&q=journalism+and+weblog Copy that address and paste it into your Bloglines aggregator, and you’ll start getting any news that’s in the media about your topic right away. When you start getting results from your feed, you may want to refine your search until you get a manageable number of posts. And remember, you can create as many of these feeds as you like, with as many terms as you like (as long as they are separated by a plus sign.) (Thanks to the folks at voidstar.com for providing this service.)

The first pro for using blogs and wikis is it will allow a new way to communicate. Students will be able to stay connected to what is happening in the classroom and will be able to post concerns, question and ideas. Teachers will be able to communicate with the students by keeping their blogs updated. Blogs and wiki allows the teacher to access new teaching ideas from other teacher blogs and also share and reflect with other teachers of what is going on in their classroom.

The next pro is letting the students become immersed with a diverse audience. The blog and wiki allows the students to interact with students nationally and even globally. This can enlighten students with their views about the world and can help the students to become aware of different cultures and beliefs.

The first negative about blogs and wikis is lack of interaction with one another. A key concept for many students to develop and grow is socializing with one another. Students will be able to learn when there are hands on projects and live discussions within the classroom. Blogs and Wikis could become a crutch to use for discussions, and assignments. You have to find a balance where the students are hands on learning and also learning how to connect to the world by technology. The second negative about blogs and wikis is the accessibility students might not have the technology at home to blog and use wikis to communicate with other students and the teacher.