ETEC 524- Technology Play Testing BLOGS

So we've all heard of the term "blog" but what exactly is it? 

My personal definition of a blog is, "a personal online journal or diary that is updated frequently." This definition is vague in regards to the substance or content that a blog may embody, due to it really being whatever you would want it to be. It's merely a collection of posts on any topic that you choose. 

• Blog is short for the weblog and the two words are used interchangeably. 
• Blogger is a person who keeps a blog.
• Blogging is the action of writing a blog.
• Vlog is a blog in which the postings are primarily in video form.
• Blogging tool is a software hosted locally or on the internet that allows you to easily generate content for your blog and post it to the internet in XML format (You can add functionality to comments, tags, organize uploads, etc.).
• Bizblog is a blog owned by a business.
• Audioblog is where the blogger posts recordings of voice, music, or another audio content, often with textual annotation to identity the content for indexing. 

AFFORDANCES OF BLOGGING

Teacher leadership is an intricate part of education reforms; but what exactly makes a leader? Leadership not only consists of skills and knowledge, but more focus should be placed on professional identity and development. Being innovative, consistently advancing your skills and knowledge, while creating your professional identity are the ingredients for an attractive leader. Blogging creates an opportunity for professional development, pedagogical transactions, social interactions, intellectual deliberations, and more. The usage of blogs supports teachers in their efforts to be leaders in their classrooms, schools, and districts.

How we utilize blogs are based upon our needs, goals, and values. The need stems from our interest and we further seek how we can use them to increase our knowledge or and make it valuable to us.

Blogs are a social thing...

Blogs are used as a source of communication; from one individual to an unlimited amount of others. Similar to books, radios, newspapers, and televisions; bloggers are also seeking to convey a message to their audience. Readers are allowed to reply or comment on blogs to spark discussions and potentially increase the knowledge and interest of the topic at hand. 

Inc.com provides 8 tips for Effective Social Blogging

1. Position yourself as an expert
2. Share experiences and information
3. Keep it fresh and mix it up
4. Encourage interaction and feedback
5. Use schedulers and update apps
6. Make your blog the central hub
7. Link back to your website
8. Use a personal touch

Cognitive Affordances of Blogging

Dating back to cavemen, writing has always been an effective means of communication. Modern society's bloggers are able to express themselves more vividly through the use of videos, simulation, audio, pictures, and more. It presents the reader with an opportunity to understand a topic better.

Emotional Affordance

Blogs are meaningful to many readers. Blogs not only provide knowledge but in many ways inspire, motivate, and encourage its readers.

Social, cognitive, and emotional affordances interact with one another and each play an important role in the making of a blog. They each cultivate one another and increase the process of learning.

*Comparing Blog Platforms*

(Click the picture for a larger view)

I explored each of the platforms above and with much research, I decided to go with Google's "Blogger." I love how it links directly to my google account (easy access) and has many great features for free! I am also able to tag a custom domain to my blog.

The Blogging Pupil

As a middle school AVID instructor, I am constantly thinking of new innovative ways to incorporate technology in my classroom. My students are currently required to submit a current event assignment each week. I would love to incorporate blogging into this assignment. I feel that it would be a great way to incorporate technology and stimulate discussion amongst the topics.

Content

With this assignment, I am addressing social studies by exploring current and real life news. The students are analyzing their current events by breaking down the information into parts, exploring understandings and relationships, comparing, organizing, deconstructing, interrogating, and finding. With increased discussion (comments on current event blog) their level of thinking will reflect all levels of thinking according to Blooms Revised Taxonomy; Creating, Evaluating, Analyzing, Applying, Understanding, and Remembering.

Pedagogy

This represents, "The Age of Simulation-Interaction" and relates closely to Lev Vygotsky's "Social Constructivism." I am encouraging discovery learning by basing knowledge on experiences we learn from the world around us. The blogs promote student centered learning and my job as a teacher is to motivate, serve as more knowledge, and ensure that lessons focus concepts or categories to support their learning process.

Technology

Through the use of this technology, students will be able to increase their cognitive and social skills. Their writings will still be held to a higher standard in which I will grade each of their blogs as I would a written paper. They are able to explore each others topics (use the search engine if needed) and comment insightful information for each others current event. 

Other ways to Use Blogging in the Learning Environment

• Publish assignments, resources, and keeps students and parents up to date on class events, due dates, and content being covered
• Help students master content and improve their writing skills
• Publish students writing and increase their knowledge on a particular subject
• Students can create blogs for extracurricular activities such as; basketball, chess club, cheerleading, upcoming prom, senior trip, etc.

Blogging Obstacles in the Classroom

An obstacle that I may face is ensuring that the technology is available for every student. Some students have access to computers at home while others do not. To provide each student with an equal opportunity, I have scheduled classroom time for the students to use computers. Some students also use various media source (the tv, radio, newspaper,etc) to collect a current event and hand write their story at home and then type their blog in class. 

*Tech Play 2*

Exploration:

E-portfolios can be developed in a variety of ways. Blogging platforms, websites, wikis, and other proprietary tools are often used to create E-portfolios. After exploring different Blogging sites, wix.com, flavors.me, pathbrite (proprietary), wikis, and weekly.com. 

My Creation:

After exploring each of the tools above, I felt that a website would better execute my needs for an E-portfolio. My favorite sites to use were wix.com and weebly.com. I researched their popularity and the chart below demonstrates each sites trending interest over time. It appears that wix is more sought after by internet users but this still was not a determining factor as to whether the site would be the best fit for my needs.

Affordances of each:

Templates

Although both sites had many templates to choose from,I  fell in love with the templates offered and it was more user friendly to me. All I had to do was choose the website that best fit my needs and then plug in my text and images. It was that simple!

 A downfall with Wix's template was that once you chose your template, it was a land of no return! You could never change your template design again. However, Weebly makes changing template designs quite simple. The user just has to click on the template they would like to use, and all their website content will automatically be transferred to the new template. No information will be lost. If you are handy with HTML codes, Weebly allows you to modify the website with the us of those codes. An affordance of wix is that it is a drag and drop site allowing you to post your comments and images anywhere on the page. This affordance could be the reason as to what why one is not allowed to change their template (it could be quite difficult to execute).

Websitebuilder.com offers this comparison of the two sites:

 The differences between Wix and Weebly are very noticeable.

Wix seems to have adopted the “advanced features” approach, giving you all sorts of tools to play with within their website builder.

Weebly seems to have gone the opposite way of adopting the minimalistic approach, keeping things as streamlined and as simple as possible.  This makes Weebly much easier to use.

Also, even though Wix gives you a lot more advanced features, Weebly gives you more flexibility (such as changing templates, important external templates, being able to edit its CSS / HTML codes, and also exporting your website).

At the end of the day, you should consider what features are better suited for you.

Wix has a lot more advanced features for you (especially with their App Market), which can be very useful for you if you are building a website that requires a bit more bells and whistles.  But as I mentioned above, overloading your website with advanced features is not necessarily a good thing.

I have to admit though, that the fact that Wix doesn’t make it easy for you to change design templates is a concern.  Having said that, their templates are beautiful.

I’d encourage you to sign up for free accounts with both Wix and Weebly and spend a bit of time playing around with each one of them.  Only through these free trials that you can form your own conclusion as to which website builder is better for your own unique needs.

Just another quick note – both Wix and Weebly offer money back guarantees (14 days for Wix and 30 days for Weebly), so if you want to upgrade and test their advanced features, you can do so without taking on risks.

Create Something..

I have began creating both a weebly and wix account. I really liked using wix more but I had difficulty with saving some of my changes and getting rid of the template information. I created a site on wix because it was more simple but I do miss the extra options and layout that wix offers. I plan to speak with someone in their tech department so that I can fix the problem with my website. 

MY SITES ARE:

www.wix.com/shaylateaches

www.weebly.com/shaylateaches

Content:

If I were looking for a tool to use in my classroom for e-portfolios, I would choose a proprietary such as Pathbrite. The Pathbrite for Institutions offers to help administrators improve student performance tracking, align courses to institutional learning outcomes and rubrics, and introduce easy-to-use course and community management tools” which now means portfolios can now be tailored at any level from student, classroom, school to even institution-wide.

-Tech Play 3-

Introducing more creativity into your classroom and assignments doesn’t necessarily make teaching difficult, but any many ways makes it more interesting. Stacking dull papers to grade was never anyone’s favorite part of teaching. Creativity tools offer teachers the ability to introduce not only a different way of learning but also makes grading these assignments more fun. Giving assignments that require more creativity will likely result in more engaging work for your students, and a more entertaining grading process for you.

I explored a few creativity tools that I am interested in incorporating into my classroom. Some I compared and contrasted to see which benefit would closely align to my classroom. 

POWERPOINT v. PREZI

The way you present your presentation is equally important as its content. From exploring both tools closely, I soon discovered that comparing them could be as similar to comparing apples and oranges. Microsoft PowerPoint software program is the premier presentations tool known today, but it doesn’t offer the magical applications found in Prezi. Prezi exploits a single, non-linear canvas to create the magical world of digital presentations. For example, during the presentation, impressive theme arrangements, larger-than-life text, and zooming images appears to jump off the screen.

	Powerpoint	Prezi
Pros	It is extremely user friendly. Chances are you had plenty of practice with Microsoft PowerPoint throughout your years of school. It comes with pre-made slide layouts that allow you to easily change the colors, fonts, and backgrounds used in each slide. You can add interesting slide transitions to make your presentation more fun (although overusing them is not recommended). You can print handouts of all of your slides. This is especially helpful in classroom situations where you want everyone to be able to take notes and follow along easily. You can seamlessly insert hyperlinks into a slide that can be clicked on to open up webpages.	The zoom function. Prezi opens up as a large canvas filled with all of your information in a creative and unique way. When you want to speak about a particular topic, you simply zoom in on the part of your canvas that is filled with that information. You can then zoom out and zoom into another part of the canvas. Instead of fumbling around trying to find a particular slide, you can smoothly and easily navigate your presentation. When you zoom in, you can pan around that particular area to show more details. It is free and web-based, which means you can work from any computer with Flash and an internet connection. You don’t need to download any programs onto your computer and you don’t need to carry around an external hard drive or flash drive in order to present. Images can be inserted horizontally, vertically, or at any angle you can imagine. You can easily insert photos, videos and audio. Since they are web-based, Prezi presentations can easily be embedded into blogs and webpages. You can design pages to make them look as though they are a magazine or newspaper article.
Cons	You actually have to buy the software! This is sometimes forgotten due to the fact that it is found on most business and school computers, but if you want it on your home computer you’ll have to purchase Microsoft Office. The graphics leave much to be desired. All too often PowerPoint is associated with outdated graphics and cheesy clipart. While you can certainly make PowerPoint presentations look a bit more modern, many of the pre-made slide layouts have been seen too many times. The linear slide format makes it difficult to go back to a specific slide during a presentation without fumbling around on your computer and seeming unprepared. While some may prefer the easy to follow linear format, others may want to jump around during their speech. Images can only be inserted horizontally or vertically – you don’t have a lot of creative license when inserting photographs.	The interface of Prezi can seem overwhelming when you first begin using it. While PowerPoint is a widely known program, Prezi is not usually taught in schools. You’ll have to learn an entire new program before you can begin making presentations. A lot of people have complained about developing headaches or getting dizzy because of all of the animation and zooming that is used within Prezi. You can’t print out slides (since there are no slides), so your audience won’t be able to have a copy of your presentation for reference or note-taking. In order to use Prezi offline, you will have to purchase the program – which is most costly than Microsoft Office. The pre-made templates cannot be edited. As opposed to PowerPoint, you cannot change the color schemes or font used within the template. All of the animation used within Prezi can actually distract your audience from the actual content of the presentation. It can be a bit gimmicky and unprofessional. It hasn’t been around as long as PowerPoint has, so some features still need a bit of tweaking to make them more user-friendly.

I created the document below while exploring Gliffy. I really enjoyed using this tool and it really made creating charts and diagrams more fun with the many options it provided.

TPACK

	Content	Pedagogy	Technology
Powerpoint	Any of the content covered in the classroom can be covered from using this tool.	-Students can use this tool to take notes. -Students will take quizzes over how to use this tool.	- May use this on or offline. -Students/ Teachers are able to use this on the computer/ tablet/ or a phone.
Prezi	Any of the content covered in the classroom can be covered from using this tool.	-Students can use this tool to take notes. -Students will take quizzes over how to use this tool.	- May use this online only. -Students/ Teachers are able to use this on the computer/ tablet/ or a phone.
Gliffy	Any of the content covered in the classroom can be covered from using this tool.	-Students can use this tool to take notes. -Students will take quizzes over how to use this tool.	- May use this online only. -Students/ Teachers are able to use this on the computer/ tablet/ or a phone.