WCS Technology Integration

Workshop with Will Richardson

I hope most of you have had a little time to rest from Will’s 3-hour training session. I know a lot of material was covered and that it probably seems quite daunting to think about integrating everything into your busy teaching schedules.

To help you internalize the material, I’d like to recap a few things… First, I think the point of yesterday’s session wasn’t neccesarily a ploy to make all of you classroom bloggers, but, rather to open up the world of blogging to you. Once you understand what blogging is, how HUGE it has become, and what type of material is available for you to read, then, you might begin thinking about incorporating such a practice into your instruction. Palloff and Pratt (1999, p.16) believe that active learning occurs when
“learners actively create knowledge and meaning through
experimentation.” As educators, we must experiment with blogging. We
need to understand how it works, why it works, and how it can work for
us.

Yesterday’s workshop was by no means a way for Will to convice WCS that every teacher should use blogs in the classroom. He was merely opening your eyes to a new community. For years, researchers have been writing about the effects of communities on learners. Just as important in traditional face-to-face classrooms, learning communities are vital on the internet. Blogs are learning communities. Yes, some material out there is inappropriate for our students, but we can’t neglect the seemingly immediate communities that develop within the blogosphere.

I’d like all of you to explore blogs. Don’t worry about wikis, RSS, del.icio.us, and the myriad of other techie terms Will threw out. Blogs have been around for a while, and as you saw, are growing everyday. Go out and read. Find a blog about your hobby, your educational practices, your favorite food. Once you understand the blogging world, and its communities, you might want to look into RSS to “easily” gather the posts from all of “your” blogs. More on that later…

Palloff, Rena M. & Kieth Pratt. Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.

technorati tags:Blogs, RSS, Will, Richardson