Module 2

WOW! Module Two was great! My apologies to anyone reading - I tend to be bit of a rambler! I think I'll answer the reflection question first:

"Do you have any reflections on the use of blogs in the
classroom?"

As I said in my previous post, for the first half of the year I participated in the Multimodal Project with my team teacher. We set up a blog for the students to use as a communication tool with another primary school in Korea. We used Edublogs as the preferred blog platform. This is a closed blog, but I have provided a screenshot of the blog below:

We used this to ask, and answer, questions with our partner school, and we uploaded video tours of the school that the students put together using Movie Maker. The blogs really motivated the students and it gave them a different form of "pen pal" to speak to. Also, the students were twice as excited when we Web Conferenced with the school using MSN Messenger and a web cam to see those we have been speaking to. The students (and staff) also enjoyed speaking to their old Year 2 teacher, who was in Korea teaching the students English. I believe blogs are a great tool for the classroom. Our students are Twentieth Century Learners - this is their world. Why should we try to discourage this digital revolution? This is the future and so we should be equipping our students for what's to come, rather than what has been.

Course Reflections

Setting up the blog was pretty much straight forward. It is interesting to compare the similarities and differences with Edublogs. I love the "In Mrs Mc Namara's Class" blog. With proper permission from parents, I think that this would be an excellent idea to do with a class. It also allows parents to keep track of what the children are learning in class.

My next site was the "Art Projects for Kids". I naturally went here because I love art. I'm tempted to start a blog about my own art and the art I do with my students in the classroom. Some of the art here was excellent!

Until the next module...

Ciao

A