Blogs and Wikis in Education

1. There are many unique and innovative ways to use blogs and wikis in the K-12 classroom. The first is the availability and the easiness to pass information and data to your students and their parents. Instead of emailing 26 different students, you can upload a document or update your blog and students can access the information themselves anywhere at anytime. Wikis are a creative way to get every child involved with both the information in the classroom and technology through individual and group contributions. In today’s generation technology is becoming more and more important not only in schools but in future careers, by introducing students to different forms of tools of the computer the more comfortable those students are with technology. Blogs are an interesting tool for the classroom, where often creativity is not expected on the internet, a blog allows students to be individuals. Each blog is customizable down to every color and font; allowing students to express themselves on a venue often seen as uncreative and unexpressive.

2. I would use an RSS within the classroom to find new information on the particular news sites and other blogs that our classroom follows. Using an RSS gives you the most up to date information about a particular site, allowing you to know when new information is available to use in your classroom. Though this can be seen as unreliable sometimes for information, but it does allow for you to plan better if you can read in your email. Your students can also use an RSS reader to do daily reading assignments or current events. Having students use technology gets them interested in the different opportunities technology has to offer in both the classroom and real world.

3. There are pros and cons to using blogs and wikis in education. Two pros are the involvement of your students with education outside of the classroom and using technology to further their understanding and comfort with it. By accessing this information outside of the classroom it keeps students interested in the topics they learned at school and encourages them to explore more resources the computer has to offer. Blogs and wikis are also great ways to get students who might be shy in the classroom setting to contribute to the group effort, this might help them feel more accepted by their peers and possible allow them to break through their shyness and contribute inside of the classroom instead. Two cons of using blogs and wikis is that not every student might have easy access to a computer with internet capabilities, and that wikis can be accessed by anyone on the internet. The first issue dealing with socioeconomics is difficult to gauge, you don’t want these students feeling excluded or falling behind due to their inability to access the information online, hopefully as a teacher you can help them find access to the information in an effective manner. The second con of anyone being able to access these sites stresses that you teach your students privacy by not using their full names and keeping personal information off of the internet. Wikis are also susceptible to being changed by anyone on the internet, if there was a way to approve a comment it would help prevent inappropriate language or material from being posted. The biggest concern with anything dealing with students and the internet is safety and it is the job of the teacher to stress to their students the importance of internet safety and pass the message onto their parents.

-Matt Melka

GO COUGS!