Panelists: Blogs are changing education

At a ceremony to honor excellence in education blogging yesterday, winners of the first-ever eSchool News “Best of the Education Blog” Awards talked about the significance of blogging in education during a panel discussion. All agreed: The impact that blogging is having on teaching and learning is profound.

Some of the quotes which I find useful/interesting as I scan the report:

  • “Kids are getting excited and engaged in literacy through blogging, commenting, and sharing ideas”
  • There is an excitement that comes from writing for a real, authentic audience instead of a circular file seen only by the teacher
  • Our students are tech-savvy, and we need to make sure we take advantage of this
  • today’s digital tools make blogging extremely easy, especially when compared with the effort it used to take to upload files online via the File Transfer Protocol or build a web page using Hypertext Markup Language
  • Sharing ideas with the world today is “so easy,” Fryer said. “Now, it doesn’t take anything but a web browser to engage in these conversations.
  • You shouldn’t ban the use of an instructional tool such as blogs, simply because it might be dangerous if misused; instead, you should teach students about the proper–and safe–use of the tool and then enforce the rules.

The full article goes here.
[source: eSN online]

Visit by DDMers

this afternoon 16 fellow teachers visited etd to find out more about r&d. hereis a list of documents which may be useful. so if you are here, do grab them if you like 🙂
1. blogger.com HOWTO – creation of a blog on blogger.com is really a breeze, 3 steps, 5 minutes and your blog will be up. this is a step-by-step guide that will lead you through the setting up.
2. bloglines.com HOWTO – bloglines is an online RSS reader. the reader would be useful if you need to monitor updates in a class of 40, and you have 3 classes.
3. WinXP Chinese Input Method Editor (IME) 3.0 HOWTO – students will be able to setup CL input at home by following the steps described; pass it to CL teachers for distribution.
4. last but not least, join us at TecXplorers.net and network with us.
look forward to see you in the next TecXplorers gathering 🙂