Chapter Responses

Ch. 2 & 3 Response:

I have to say that I hadn't thought that weblogs were this important, I had the idea that they were mostly just personal websites where people just share personal information about what is happening in their lives.  My first experience with a weblog was when my friend went to South Africa for an internship program a few years ago, she created a weblog so that friends could follow her experience.  She posted pictures, comments, and we could leave comments as well.  I thought that that was a very interesting tool, and very convenient, I did enjoy very much knowing what she was up to while being so far away, especially because back then Facebook or Myspace were not very popular yet.

I hadn't thought of weblogs as source of information or even as a source of communication where people can have a dialogue about a particular subject.  Although I’m just realizing that most of the news articles I read on the web, are just weblogs.  I’m also very surprised to see how easy it is to build a weblog; a few years ago I was taught how to use Front Page to build web pages and although it was much easier than learning html code, it still was not very easy to use.  And uploading it into the web was quiet a challenging as well.  Also few years ago, I built a website using Microsoft Publisher, and although it was easier than Front Page, especially when it cam to publishing to the web, to update the site required a lot of time from my part.

Ch.  4, 5, & 6 Response:

These chapters touched on tools that are very much new to me.  I had no experience with Wikis until I started this program, to me everything on the web were just websites that were the same, but as I've learned, there are weblogs and wikis which are two different forms of websites.  What I've liked about wikis is the fact that they seemed very easy to built, and they can look just as good as a website.

RSS is an interesting tool, I can really see it being use by someone who likes to read news articles, but at this point I’m still feeling a bit unsecured to using it.  I feel that before I can start using it I need to be more familiar and more comfortable with blogs.  Blogs are still a bit obscure to me and I just need to explore them a little as I haven’t done that very much.

I haven’t created a twitter account yet, so haven’t explore this part of social networking.  I hear about it mostly from the news, as this seems to be the way celebrities and athletes are now communicating their on goings.  At this point I don’t see how we can use this in education, I see it as great way to communicate something to a lot of people, but anything educational I’m not seen it.  Also what I see on the media is often negative, since I often hear that so and so got in trouble for something that they posted on their twitter account.

   

Ch. 7, 8, & Response:

I signed up for Flickr.com a few years ago, I found out about it over the Internet and thought it was a great way to store your pictures and have access to them wherever you could connect to the web.  It was also extremely convenient to have so much free memory at your disposal for all of your pictures.  At that time, I used it to share pictures with friends that were far away and I used it in my workplace.  I was in a position where I was required to take lots of pictures about the programs we were running in our after school program and share them within our organization.  So Flickr made it very easy for me to do that since I could share a big amount of pictures at a time, which was something I couldn't do through email.

I think that the options for using Flickr in the classroom sound very interesting, kids love using pictures and searching for pictures.  The projects that are described in the chapter all sound very interesting I can’t think of a good reason why kids wouldn’t like to participate in such projects.

Podcasts are new to me, I have not tried this to this day, and even after reading the chapter, I still feel a bit skeptical about its use in the classroom.  It could be because I enjoy images way more than I do sounds with no images. 

Social networking is a controversial topic in education now days.  Teachers are being discouraged by schools, or districts to participate in such activities.  I feel that this could a powerful tool in communication, in terms of communicating with parents and students.  It is sad this is being pushed away and not giving it a chance to explore under some structured guidelines.