Sunday, January 20, 2008

Here I go with my intro!!

I must admit that I was feeling somewhat intimidated with the thought of creating my own blog. Being who I am, I first did alot of reading about blogging and looked at many blogs. I needed to explore how blogging would benefit my learning and my students' learning before building my own.

The Horizon Report 2007 stated, 'some blogging scholars say that the forum for airing ideas and receiving comments from their colleagues helps them to hone their thinking and explore
avenues they might otherwise have overlooked.' A very good argument for blogging in this course.
According to Serim and Schroek in Nailing Digital Jelly to a Virtual Tree-Tracking Emerging Technologies for Learning, in schools, blogs, wikis, videos and podcasts have made learning more interactive. They positively support teaching and sharing of information which positively effects student learning. Another good argument for blogging!

An excellent article about blogging that I would encourage others to read is from the periodical, Learning and Leading with Technology called, Blogging and the Media Specialist by Frances Jacobson Harris(2006). She compared student and adults use of blogs. How they set up their blog and who they are communicating too may be different but their overall reasons for blogging are similar. According to Harris these are the reasons for blogging in a nutshell:
Blogs...
- provide a natural environment for active learning
- provide the opportunity to connect students to the media centre
- can transmit a sense of voice
- are a vehicle of self expression
- are a vehicle of communication
- are a vehicle of information

Now I was convinced that blogging would be beneficial to myself and students but I wanted to examine other blogs and their purposes. Like many of you, I went to W. Richardson's blog list.Talk about getting side tracked! There are alot of blogs out there and I liked the fact that he organizes them into different groupings. Hey, I thought... I can actually do this too! They really looked great and I was eager to jump on the band wagon!

My decision to choose Blogger came from examining a few free blog publishing tools and talking with my teens. I went to the blog site and took a tour. It explained what a blog was and how to navigate the site. I felt it was user friendly and opted to sign up with them.

Choosing a name took a bit of time but I settled on 'A Kaleidoscopic World' as it is indicative of the multifaceted, varied, complex, intricate technological world that I will be living in during this course and infusing into my working and personal life now.

I truly look forward to learning through blogging. Already I have surprised myself with learning how to post, edit, and upload on this site and I still want to do and learn more. Everyone's blog is creative and different which adds to my journey in technology.

As we work together...we learn together!

Cindy

3 comments:

Joanne said...

Hi there,

I love your explanation for the title of your blog--I think that's a great way to think about the exciting (and sometimes scary and sometimes confusing) world of technology that we are all immersed in right now!

I look forward to your future posts...

elizabeth said...

Like you, I needed to read alot about blogs before starting my own and I sure got easily distracted looking at all those blogs. I think the Horizon report comment about honing thinking and exploring avenues otherwise overlooked rings true. It is great the way the interaction makes you rethink your understanding as you consider ideas put forth by others.

Arlene said...

Like joanne, I also like your blog name. It reminds me of the phrase "constellation of skills" used in Information Literacy in an Information Society under "Technology Impact" at http://www.libraryinstruction.com/information-literacy2.html