Asynchronous Tools Edublog

Summary: An edublog is a blog created for educational purposes. Edublogs store and support student and teacher learning by facilitating reflection, questioning by self and others, and collaboration. The use of blogs has become popular in education public schools and colleges. Blogs can be useful tools for sharing information and tips among co-workers, providing information for students, or keeping in contact with parents. Common examples include blogs written by or for teachers to maintain or extending learning from the traditional classroom setting. In addition, students can use Edublogs for setting up their own personal blogs or even use it to collect data for Project Based Learning (PBL) when tackling real-world issues. Who would benefit from using Edublogs?: Teachers, professors, students and co-workers would benefit from the use of Edublogs due to the easy accessibility and user-friendly web design allows an array of users to access the resources and tools within the program. Obviously, teachers and students can use the blog site to carry conversations with one another on various topics introduced in the lesson cycle or it can even be used to help students work collaboratively with others to extend/apply the schema from previous lessons in a non-traditional way. Professors could use Edublogs as an additional resource tool to extended students experiences with distance learning as well as exposing students to various modalities of online learning

and the way various tools can be used to authentically create interest in a particular subject area. What type of interaction/higher order thinking/creativity does the tool promote? How? Why? Users of Edublogs use higher order thinking skills by analyzing and creating various blogs within a given subject/content area and users even have the opportunity to extend on others thoughts by response to a given blog. In addition, Edublogs promotes authentic collaboration where ideas can be shared in a non-threatening manner and it facilitates an avenue of collaboration and learning for struggling students who may not have the knowledge base needed to participate. People who have no idea what others are referring to can read others post and then begin to generate their own ideas on the subject and then can participate with the discussion. In other words, students are learning from students. Have you used the tool before? If so, how?: I have heard of this tool before from other educators but I have never used this prior to this class. Is it easy to setup and use?: Edublogs is very easy to set up and use. The setup and required information takes less than two minutes, and the email response from the web site was instantaneous after a login has been established. Students from grade 6-12 would find this tool very user friendly, and if a district or university wanted to use this across their system, the setup would take more time with adding individual students and setting up logins; however, the steps are fairly easy to follow. Advantages for using this tool: Edublogs offers real time response for students, teachers and co-workers within an organization, as well as being able to read and respond to several responses within a given thread. Disadvantages of using the tool: One glaring disadvantage of using this tool is that a student, teacher, co-worker would have to login in each time to read responses on specific blogs. Unless they are logged in 24/7 or in front of their computer, there is not a system set up which notifies a user that a new post has been submitted. How does this tool contribute to building interaction/allowing discussions of content in an educational setting?: As mentioned earlier, Edublogs allows teachers, students, and co-workers to set up blog responses on particular issues discussed in class or even issues, which may not have been discussed during class time. In addition, Edublogs allows others to read other responses to help in formulating and organizing thoughts prior to responding to a particular thread.

How could this be used in a specific situation?: It could be used to extend discussion on a specific subject covered in class, to create ideas by posting a question for others to reflect/respond to, or it could even be used to have students generate a open-ended response to a particular passage in a novel/short story. Does this change the level of education or the setting?: Edublogs is subject to how the user chooses to use the program. In other words, the user drives the complexity and the rigor and relevance to specific blogs and threads. What do you thing about the tool? Dislike?: I like the tool because the student has given perimeters to function within as it relates to the blog; however, the loose control comes to how students learn from one another and how they respond to one another. This tool allows distance learning to be authentic in the way that student interpret blogs and how the blogs relate to their previous learning experiences.