Blogging Summary..

Blogging should be integrated into the everday teaching and learning experiences through many different subjects. Whatever learning experience that is being taught is able to be integrated in someway with I.C.T. and it is important to do this in order to enhance the children's I.C.T. skills and knowledge. The more experience in using these tools helps to develop confident and I.C.T. literate students in society. Setting up blogs can be time consuming but they can be set up over time and a lot of teachers think that it involves too much time and effort so don't bother attending to this. It is essentially something that develops as you use it and everything you add builds up the overall look of your blog. It is made easier as templates have been designed and are available for you and your students to use and therefore you personalise your own blog as you go. It is easy to link blogs to a theme that you are focusing in on your class, or set up a blog for a maths or science experiment taking place.

It could be a good idea to set up a timetable for your class computer so that students can post their personal blog throughout the day. This is also dependent on if you have a computer in your class however, this is becoming very regular and most classrooms these days have at least one computer. Encouraging students to access this blog at home in their own time is great. Otherwise students who do not have this opportnuity can perhaps access the blogs at other times during the day say at lunch time with supervision if they wish to. For all learning to be relevant and meaningful to students it needs to have an authentic context. This is the same with blogging and if this is not happening students will not have the interest for it if there is no relevance to their learning. It needs to be fun and worthwhile or students will not partake in sharing their personal blogs with the class.

For instance, by using bebo as a blogging network and integrating it with an authentic context will encourage students to want to use it especially because bebo is so popular with children these days. So long as the teacher monitors children's progress and blogs then this bebo networking can be a neat way to incorporate contextual learning relevant to the technology out there in today's world.

A great quote I found about the progressive teaching and learning that needs to always be monitored with the ever changing technological world deals with the fact that teachers are getting trained, but classes often do not relate to teaching and learning.

"Teachers are being asked to learn new methods of teaching, while at the same time they are facing the greater challenges of rapidly increasing technological changes and greater diversity in the classroom...[ yet,] relatively few teachers (20 percent) reported feeling very well prepared to integrate educational technology into classroom instruction." (U. S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, January 1999).

This I believe is so true and because I feel comfortable with the use of I.C.T it enables me to want to integrate it as much as possible throughout my teaching. I do understand however, that if a teacher does not feel comfortable with the use of bebo for instance then they will most likely not bother to learn or understand about how this social network works.