My Comments For Teachers #3 assignment was to comment on Dorothy Burt's blog. For my first week I read her post titled Student Reflections
In her post she discusses how the Manaiakalani students reflect on their blogs. The students reflect about their first year of owning a netbook to do all of their school work. The post was very interesting and well organized. I like how she provided links to the students posts. From the reflections of her students they seem to be very engaged in the writing process. The students also learned how to do research using the internet and Youtube. Having their own netbook allowed them to post on their blog much more frequently. They also liked having an audience to read their posts. I Congratulated her on the success of her students while using their Netbooks. As a future educator I hope that I will have the skills to effectively use technology in the classroom.
She did not have a new post so I went back to the post before which was titled:
Got a Blog? Make a Book! for my second assignment. In this post she discusses how you can make a book out of a blog. By using blog2print you can have your blog printed into a book. That is something I would have never thought about until reading her post. I think that it would be a great idea to be able to print a book of your blog. A student could have a keepsake on projects that they had worked on all year. I think that it would also be good to have a book to show your family and friends without having to log onto a computer. The one downside is that you cannot experience video or sound in a printed book. I agree with her on the fact that you would not be able to enjoy the multimedia aspects in the printed version. However as she said, text and images are a very important part of a blog. I still think that it would be neat to have a book to show all your work as a first time blogger.
HI James
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for taking the time to visit my blog and to reflect on it so thoroughly. I really appreciate this.
One interesting thing has changed since I did the Blog2Print post; Apple have now released iBook Author and we now have the ability to embed video and other multimedia content in our eBooks. That is a huge step in the right direction ie engaging 21st century kids.
I don't know if you have explored this or not, but I would be interested in your perspective. In NZ we do not tend to educate our children via prescribed texts as you do in North America. So whilst we love the iBook Author concept we would not like to see our classes revert to ones where the teachers are working their way through set text books. This is an example of the cultural differences you get exposed to by joining the blogging community :)
Best wished for your teaching career
Dorothy
Auckland, NZ
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments. I have not yet had the chance to explore the iBook Author concept. That's sounds like a really great advancement for eBooks. You are right, the blogging community exposes you to many different cultures throughout the world. I think NZ is leading in the right direction for education. I believe that here in America we will eventually do away with textbooks. However, it may take several years.