Embedded Task One

Reflection – Blogs

Surprisingly, I have enjoyed getting to know Blogger. With practice, I have become familiar with some of the technical aspects of this ICT product and can see the value of its use in my future classrooms.

Technical Aspects

There are many settings that can be used on blogger to change the way it looks. This includes changing the font type, size, colour and alignment. To make a post more interesting, it is possible to embed photographs and videos. One of my blog posts features differing font formatting, cartoons and headings to be more interesting and easily read. I received positive peer feedback on this post for the use of pictures.

It was interesting to see others’ blogs and how they had customised their space. It urged me to explore changing my theme for my blog. Blogger has many themes to choose from and differing colour settings within each of these themes. I believe this gives users an opportunity to make a blog that is quite personalised.

When I ran into user difficulties I discovered I was not the first to have these problems as it is a commonly used blog medium. A Google search revealed many ways to sort through my issues. I believe even if someone is not an experienced user they can access help quickly and easily.

I liked on others’ blog sites how they had tabs and I thought for a long time that Blogger did not have this function. A quick Google search revealed it could. After a struggle, I worked out the small things I was doing wrong by watching a YouTube video. I decided to show this on my blog in case someone else was having the same issue!

While I like the idea of a WIKI and having multiple authors to contribute to a class collaborative product, I feel that a blog is a happy medium. If I take the example of students using a WIKI in my revised Geography lesson, a class blog may suffice. I would be able to post asking them to share their links to their YouTube videos in the comments. Alternatively, students can be added as authors to the blog so that they can write their own posts.

Legal, Safety and Ethical Considerations

I found myself embedding content and not being as mindful of copyright as I need to be. I stumbled across the “Stats” section of Blogger and saw that people from the US had accessed my blog and there was traffic from Google. I went back in straight away to attribute the content correctly. I experienced a “work in progress” mentality with blogging, often going back in and tweaking things on my posts. I would share this experience with my students to alert them to the fact that they need to adhere to copyright protocols.

My experience with peer comments to date has been positive and respectful. However, secondary students will need education and clear guidelines on what makes an appropriate comment. Blogger does have feature of moderating comments before they go live which is something a teacher may consider in a class environment. The privacy settings can also be changed to protect students.

Classroom Context

I have explored throughout this post many ways to use Blogger in a classroom context. I have noted extra considerations that a teacher may have when using Blogger in the context of the classroom.

Overall, Blogger gets a tick from me.