Week 2 Reflection

My technology tasks for these two weeks were to create a Blog and a RSS Reader. My first thought was “Oh my God, how am I going to do that? I have never done this before” So, I decided just to read and follow the instructions. I never imagined that creating them was so easy! That is something I can’t forget about Google: everything is so easy with it! (I have to confess that I am a Google apps lover. I even have a nick name for it: “Saint Google”). Creating a blog was very exciting and positive experience for me. I’m just getting to know it and I see that it could be a useful tool for teaching any subject. Setting up a RSS Reader was not as funny as setting up the Blog, but I liked the idea. It can be very useful because you can all the websites that you use or visit very regularly in one place. It’s just fantastic!  I am still in the process of fully using both of them, but I have a lot of expectations.

Which part(s) of Dale’s Cone do you think each tool (Blog, RSS) lends itself best to and why? I am going to answer to this question as a teacher and as a student. I think the Blog lends itself best to many of the Dale’s Cone of Experience-Learning. Since a blog is a website like tool to me, it lends to Direct Purposeful Experience because the student is actually doing (setting up) the blog; Demonstration because is a visualized explanation; Recording because you can an audiovisual experiences display in your blog; and Visual symbols because you could have any kind of chart in a blog. I mean, practically it lends to almost all of them. I consider a RSS Reader is much simpler than a blog. But again since you can feed all kind of websites, blogs, etc, it can lend itself to some of them as well.

Blogs can be use by a single person, a group of people or an organization or institution. Potential educational uses of blogs are endless. Schools can have their blogs where they post their activities and information, especially for parents and students so they can provide feedback. A class could set up a blog for a particular subject and since it is a web 2.0 tool, the students interact with other classes and even with other schools’ students. Or you just could have each of your students create a blog for your assignment in order to share them with the rest of the class.

RSS Readers are not interactive as blogs but can be very useful. Everyone surf the net daily, so it tremendously helpful having all your favorite websites in one place. I would have my students to set up their own rss reader for my class in order they have all websites that they use when doing research for homework. That would save them some time.