“Hello, my name is Kendra, and I’m a technoholic.” Well, maybe not a true technoholic. I don’t have any cool equipment. You know, the kind with all of the bells and whistles, but I really like to blog. And the Google Reader? Don’t get me started. I admit I was very reluctant to write my thoughts on a medium that the whole world, if it chose, could read and therefore judge, but it was am assignment. What could I do? So I bellied up and just did it. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I had a lot of fun doing it and it actually changed my mind about blogging. Then, when I went back to check my blog—I still couldn’t believe it was me who wrote one—I saw that someone was following it. That was quite exciting. I had to see what else Google had to offer. That is when I did it. Completely accidentally, mind you. I set up and RSS. Whoa! Now I could follow everyone’s blog in the class without ever going to a different webpage. The heavens opened up and the choir started singing. You see, for some reason my WMU elearn site was taking a very long time to load all of the different pages. I’m not a good one for waiting. I was a little frustrated. But now I didn’t even have to go to the WMU site at all. It really made my day! As you can see, I’m hooked. I will definitely be using the Google Reader to keep track of topics I’m interested in, especially genealogy, specific news events, and educational sites. I hope I don’t sound too flighty, but I really am hooked.
Now for the question, which layer of the Dale’s Cone would I place blogs and RSS’s. To answer this question, I had to break down and analyze the types of information and learning that takes place when a person uses blogs and RSS’s. A blog takes a person’s personal thoughts and displays them in text format to anyone who would like to read it. RSS’s keep up to the minute track of any updatable site a person my be interested and stores that information, to be read, at the users leisure. There is a lot of information transfer going on, but it is only in text format. Therefore, it is my opinion that both the blog and the RSS definitely belong in the Verbal Symbols section. The information potential in both blogs and RSS’s are “limitless”, and both are “a common ground for anyone who can (read)” (and use the internet).
Computer Imagination. What exactly is it? According to Martin Siegel, Ph.D. in “Falling Asleep an Your Keyboard: The case for Computer Imagination” it is something that can do the following: “follow interest, find information, integrate multimedia, be interactive, limit the amount of information, spread ideas quickly, affect a community of users, and is updatable.” But most importantly, it “must achieve some desired end.” To use a blog or RSS as an “imaginative” tool, it must “develop understanding that leads to effective action.” Do RSS’s and blogging do these things? They can. In the world of education, blogging can be quite a tool! I had a few “problems” that blogging and could help solve. Some school—more than you think—are running on fumes as it pertains to money. This can be a problem with discipline. Some schools just don’t have the money to staff a full time in school suspension supervisor. What if students who were issued out of school suspensions had to make up their studies the same day by responding to specific teacher created blogs? They would have to follow the instructions on the blogs, visit any website listed, complete the tasks issued, and respond to the blog before the end of the day. This way the students would be responsible for his or her making up missing assignments. This problem is a big deal in the school I work at, as the powers that be say that any student getting an out of school suspension must be able to make up missing work. This way there is an alternative assignment that has time constraints. On a more positive note, blogging could be used for things like homework help. There are many teachers who can’t be available right before or after school due to other obligations. In addition, there are students who don’t know they are going to have issues with their homework until they get home to start it. In these cases, a teacher could set up a nightly blogging time to help students who have questions. Teachers could then direct students to web sites that can help. For example, if my class was working on a research report and a student was having trouble setting up a works cited page, I could direct them to citationmonster.net. A site that can help them properly site any source. Or if he was having trouble with adverbs, I could send him to any number of grammar sites. On the side, blogging could help students work on typing, spelling, sentence structure—your basic writing skills.
An interesting, imaginative way to solve the problem of parents who have trouble with their child not doing his/her assignments is using both blogging and RSS's. An RSS could be very advantageous. A parent could connect to teacher’s homework blog sites to find out exactly what a child had don at school. Teachers could write a short description of what took place in class and any related homework assignments. The parents would always be on the same page with the teacher and there is no more,
“What did you learn at school, Johnny?”
“Nothin’”
“Do you have any homework?”
“No.”
In this situation, the child has the advantage. Mom or dad has no idea if Johnny is telling the truth. But if they had just checked their RSS, they would already know the answers to both questions. An RSS could help stop the frustration of kids who don’t always tell the truth about homework or parents who just like to know what is going on with their child’s education, but don’t want to call every teacher, everyday. This solution would only take minutes for the teacher to update their blogs, and minutes for parents to check. Chalk one up for parent/teacher communication.
As you can see, I am on my way to being a “technothinker”. But, I defiantly should leave the coining of new terms to someone else.
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