Blogs and Wikis in Education

1. I searched the key words “Educational Blogs” and “Educational Wikis” into the search engines google, yahoo!, and aol. All three searches returned similar results in somewhat differing orders. They come up this way because the search engine uses the same sort of algorhythms to come up with results. The engines also come up with almost identical results because the websites that show up in the search use the same or very similar tags, which are used when a search is entered into a search engine.

2. There are many different and innovative ways that wikis and blogs can be used in education:

The first way is demonstrated by Wilker's Wikinomics, a wiki which allows the students to post interesting and relevant material appropriate to the class. By allowing the wiki to become a collaborative effort, everyone can share their own knowledge with others, expanding everyone's horizons.

The second came in Kathy's Ed Tech Blog, which shared many other educational blogs via links on her own blog. The blogs included offer compilations and interesting information. They organize events and offer information useful to those in the field of education. These types of blogs serve as online newsletters, cutting down on paper used and making them easily distributed to a lot of people at once.

From Edublogs I learned that you could use blogs as an online class publication, which takes the form of an online newspaper. An online blog can also be used to get feedback, post lesson plans, create a class website (wiki, not blog), organize class lessons, and post multimedia. Although this site offered a lot of interesting ways to use blogs and wikis, I did notice that number 8 on the "10 ways to use your education blog" was: "Organise, Organise, Organise!" Being an educational blog, I would have thought that they would spell the word "organize" correctly! This makes me question the information I have just viewed, and if it were facts I had read, I may not trust them, but since they are ideas, I can still shape them into my own.

3. RSS readers provide news updates on your computer in a simple and easy to read form for your computer. These readers are read by a program called an aggregator which transforms the news updates into people-friendly formats which are easy to read for you. For example, if you have a news bar at the bottom of your computer screen, the information that shows up is the RSS feed that has been processed by the aggregator and displayed in its present location. Both of these could be useful in the classroom on the classroom website. The aggregator can display important announcements or relevant news information (i.e. for a social studies classroom) which the students will readily see when they access the website. Often, these catch the student's attention and display important information. Not only can these be added to a class website, but they can always be displayed on the overhead screen (webprojected-screen) when students enter and leave the classroom.

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3) 2 pros for using blogs and wikis in the classroom are:
a. You can put a mass of information in a condensed and easy to use format accessible to almost everyone.
b. You can allow students to input their own ideas and share them in a discussion format viewable to everyone.

2 cons for using blogs and wikis in the classroom are:
a. Some students may not have as much access to the internet as others and therefore may be put at a disadvantage
b. If participation points are given to discussions online, some students may feel uncomfortable with their peers reading what they write and therefore will lose participation points.