Computer Imagination and putting Week 2 tools to work

As I mentioned in the first week 2 post, I had previously not affiliated myself with blogging. Since this recent activity on a blog, my views have shifted somewhat and I am at a good place now to reflect on how I can use blogging as a teacher.

For education, a blog can harness what Siegel (2003) calls one of the web's strengths in that it can "create a community of users" (p. 2) I envision my blog as either a means of professional development where my 'community' would be my colleagues; or as a connection between myself and the families from my classroom. I believe one could be "imaginative" going either of those directions, but for this purpose I will use the former example.

A blog focused on PD can allow the author to disseminate information quickly and on a regular basis to colleagues who are concerned and interested in the same types of things. Making sure the community was all linked in via RSS would be essential for keeping the blog recent, relevant and time efficient. Teaching others in my professional learning communities to simply use RSS could be the most impactful way as an educator to harness it's power. If my colleagues are using RSS for professional development, we have now given ourselves more learning opportunities collectively.

If my community was my fellow 4th grade teachers in my district, I would post only things which were related to teaching 4th grade. If my community was my entire K-5 building, I would post things relevant to lessons across those grade levels and various subject matter. This is where the aggregating feature of tags would come into play, so that readers could easily find posts which were related to their teachings. As Siegel puts it, "we can avoid having to wade through information we don't need" (p. 2). Using the many other features of blogs such as outside RSS feeds, social bookmarking widgets, permalinks, etc. would allow the author to create a dynamic experience for the community who reads the blog. The comment feature would also be a key part of building the community and allowing the posts to become conversational.

For using a Wiki as a teacher, I will go the route of integrating it with students for this post, although I already know I will be using a Wiki for collaborative reasons with my colleagues, also. Because wikis are by design clean and simple, I think they lend themselves well for student collaboration. A wiki could be a vehicle for students to present what they have learned about any topic. If the bugs of figuring out how students would log in to the wiki community (any suggestions?) were resolved, a few lessons would be dedicated to simply getting familiar with how to work in a wiki. Next, conversations would have to be had about some "ground rules" for this type of collaborative work between students. After these foundational things were out of the way, the imaginative part would really take shape. Students would be in control of great team building discussions about who is responsible for which parts of the wiki, and research would provide guided learning opportunities using selected web resources. Students would then pool their resources and decide how to present on their topic using the Wiki. The conversations could be face to face or online, and planning phases could utilize other great web 2.0 tools or stick to traditional methods depending on the constraints. A final product would result in students teaching students using a medium that would allow sharing with families across town or other students around the world!

I truly am looking forward to utilizing all three of this week's tools this next school year!
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Siegel, M. (2003). Falling asleep at your keyboard: The case for computer imagination (missing further citation)