Communication Tool-1 "edublogs"

Communication Tool: Assignment-1     Edublogs

Blogs are considered as personal web-pages. The author (usually one) publishes his/her articles, reflections or comments; these writings might be about companies, events, or persons.

“It is said that blogs date back to 1996, but they exploded in popularity during 1999 with the emergence of blogger (http://www.blogger.com) and other easy- to use publishing tools, such as ‘Movable type” (http://www.movabletype.org)”¹ .

“Before these two listed above software, authors had to hand-edit and publish with old-type CMS (Content Management System)”².

Blogging is a very useful tool in the education field.  It is basically a communication tool. However, when I visited the URL address http//edublogs.org, I learned that it is free, and I learned 10 ways to use edublogs in education that are listed on the home page (see the snapshot below) .

To get to the list, scroll down till you see the content of the box below.

(I drew the box on the website snapshot for clarification, on the webpage you will see the content of the box without the border)

By clicking in the box shown to the right you will be prompted to another page that includes a video link and the list of the 10 ways to use edublogs to teach. Some of these ways are known to teachers, because teachers are familiar the faculty websites to post information to students and parents. Other ways might be new to some teachers.

In the table below I will list the ten ways, along with the advantages and disadvantages of each way.

Ways to use edublogs	advantages	disadvantages
Share materials, news, downloads, links and more	Teachers can maintain and continue to use the edublog even after leaving the school district.	Same features are already provided through the faculty websites (through schools’ website)
Facilitate online discussions and collaboration	A feature that doesn’t exist through the school website, students submit assignments and asked questions via e-mail. Some school districts provide wikis for teachers to post questions but they are limited and in the early stages. I noticed when I started an edublog, that I can select up to 50 students (free version) to include in the discussions
Create a class publication that students can easily publish to and you can easily edit	Great tool for unit projects, power points, and research papers. In fact, there is limitless number of ideas that fits under publication.	Non that I can think off.
Replace your newsletter and stay in touch with parents about what is going on in class	Awesome communication tool. Even though, I placed my lesson plans, and weekly schedules, calendar on my school website.
Get your students blogging so that they can share their work and thoughts	Again, it is useful because some students don’t get the chance to share their thoughts due to time limitation in the classroom.
Share your lesson plans	Great!
Integrate videos, podcasts, and other media	Very useful!	Same features are already provided through the faculty websites (through schools’ website)
Get feedback or gather information	Very useful!
Create blogs for clubs, student groups, events, sports teams, or just about any type of group	Very useful!
Create a fully functional website	Very useful!

I started my blog using edublogs, the process was easy and fast. (See the snapshot below)

By reviewing the site I noticed that it can be  categorized as:

      Communication Tool,

      Networking/Social Tool (limited number of students, unless you update your blog with monthly charge). In edublogs you can create Forums and Wikis.

      Presentation Tool: you can link videos, power-points through the media library.

To start the edublog, I just needed the basic knowledge of how to use the computer, how to surf the net, and to go to the URL  http//edublogs.org. Then I followed the directions. If I needed help, I clicked on help button at the top right corner a window opened providing many options for help. I picked the “Access Our Complete user Guide”

“edublogs” is a very helpful tool to me as a school teacher. There are unlimited ways that I can benefit from it. But at least I will include the following:

1.      I will add a page for each unit in my curriculum: Beginning of the year procedures, Safety Unit, Nature of Science Unit, and so on.

2.      On each page (on the left column there is categories). I will have several categories such as assignments, Power points, weekly lesson plans, projects, resources and so on. And under each category I will add subcategories to include all assignments, power points and so on.

I did not add all what I mentioned above on my edublog yet! I learned how to add a category, and I did some mistakes by making the subcategory a category and vise versa. So it takes some practice and some time to establish the blog, but it is not hard.

3.      On edublogs, you can add users (administrators) but the login in should be the same. So, if there were 4 physics teacher they can all work on the same blog. Also, you add students as users if your blog is private. If your blog is not private, students should add their names and e-mails to comment on a post.

4.      Under tools, I found a neat trick (application). It is called “Press This” to which you can link videos, images and pages from the Web. I read about it in another article where it was named “Blogrolls”³

5.      STAT is a tool you can add if you update your blog to a Pro level. It helps you keep statistics about visitors (frequency per week, or per day as well as the terms that they used in the search engine to be introduced to your blog.

This assignment does not fit to write about every single aspect of edublogs, but I covered the required elements. I believe is a very useful communication, networking and presentation tool.

References:

(1)     http://www.lr.pi.titech.ac.jp/blogwatcher/paper/www2005-blog_fujiki.pdf

(2) A content management system (CMS) is a computer system that allows publishing, editing, and modifying content as well as site maintenance from a central page. It provides a collection of procedures used to manage workflow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content_management_system

(3) Introduction to Blogging http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging