Week 3: Blogging

Technology is a fast approaching aspect, influencing the life of adults and children of this century. What is vastly becoming popular is blogging or vlogging (video blogging). A blog is a personal diary, which is frequently updated by the author. Blogging has the opportunity for the author to share their ideas and findings to thousands of viewers a day, determining the popularity of the blog. Many different ideas can be conducted into a blog, which includes, different tutorials all the way to different knowledge and understandings of a product or topic. Blogging can also help students in the classroom. Blogging helps support students into sharing ideas and create flexible and extended thinking from the student. Blogs help support the student in their work by engaging the students with the different features the blog has on offer, as well as, sharing interests with the student. Many different materials and activities can be conducted in a blog to help students participate and learn from a blog. Activities include, PMI charts, de Bono’s hats, Collaborative Authoring, Y and T charts, and many more. PMI charts allow the students to list the positives, minuses and interests of a certain topic. This activity allows the students to extend their thinking and collaboratively work on ideas and share similar and/or different points of view about a topic. The PMI chart allows the students to extended their thinking because they will be thinking about how the topic contributes to the rest of the social ladder, and not just the student them self. De Bono’s hats are an activity that allows the students to share their different perspectives by wearing an imaginary hat there are six hats all together. Each hat represents a new way of thinking, for example, Green-Creativity, Black- Negative, Blue-Process, White- Facts, Red- Feelings and Yellow- Benefits. Many students tend to think with only one hat, with de Bono’s hats being conducted into a classroom activity, students can benefit from extended thinking to share ideas and points of view. While used in a blog, students can see and read ideas that the other students have posted to extend their knowledge about the students thinking.  Many activities can collaborate into a blog, which benefits student’s learning and knowledge about a topic or a student.   

Many activities can be conducted while blogging. Students are able to extend their knowledge using blogging as a technical form for their work. De Bono’s hats allows the students to use their different perspectives to share knowledge about a certain topic or idea. Blogging can be used to create an activity using de Bono’s hats to help students with the topic of interest. We begin the de Bono’s hats activity by giving the students a topic, for this example, the topic will be “Students should wear causal clothing to school”.  First, the students will write a blog for all their peers to see about the topic. Students are able to view, however, not comment on the student’s work. The students will be able to determine their layout and/or the website, which their blog will be featured. The teacher will the modify the activity by giving the students the template of de Bono’s thinking hats to contribute and extend their thinking process, for example, the students might have only suggested why they think it is a positive experience to have casual dress as school, which probably consisted of a few sentences. With de Bono’s thinking hats, students will be able to contribute more knowledge and understanding about the topic and understand how big the topic really consists of. Once the students have completed the activity using de Bono’s thinking hats they then post their work. This then will allow the teacher and the student’s peers to have access to their work, which then the peers will contribute ideas and comments to the student’s work. Blogging can be applied to a lot of different activities. The processing of blogging enhances the student’s learning ability and allows them to have the insight to other student’s mind and work. Blogging allows the students to participate in numerous activities, which enhances their knowledge. Blogs allow the student’s to not only contain their work but also the work of their peers, so it allows the students to participate and work together to create and benefit from vast amounts of information.

Link to Blog: 
http://kidblog.org/JessicaNoffkesClass/8cce3c29-ee59-453a-ac76-08b5e30c9e8d/should-we-wear-school-uniforms/