My 6th and final recipe tried and tested from the Web 2.0 Recipe Book was Blogging.
“Blogs are basically online journals or “logs”.” (Kist, 2010, p. 38)
Blogs are the monster cookie of the recipe book. If one has even made monster cookies you know that there are many ingredients including peanut butter, Smarties, chocolate chips, and rolled oats. These special 4 ingredients make the monster cookie the tastiest cookie I have ever eaten.
It is a place where the ingredients can be showcased together, and it is because they work so well together that the delicious monster cookie is created. The blog is where one can showcase all their ingredients, mix it together and get a very tasty end treat. Blogs are a great way to put your best work and thoughts out there for an entire world to see and comment on.
Blogs are used for many different and diverse reasons. My sister uses her blog to share with family and friends updates and photos of her family. My friend Doug uses his blog to showcase his thoughts on running through Mexico, although it has been awhile since his last post. Others use their blogs to put their thoughts “out there” for further discussions. Whatever the reason might be why someone decides to blog it is an individual choice.
Choosing to blog was not exactly an option for my first blog, it was a requirement for this class I had to do it. At first I was going to blog about my class and use it to communicate to parents. Rereading the requirements for the class, I realized that I would actually be blogging about my own personal experiences working through web 2.0 tools. This frightened me as I am a very quiet person and keep my thoughts to myself or only share them with close friends or family. Jumping into the blogging world was something that I was not sure I was up too.
Learning About the Tool
Starting off simple is the key to my success with blogging. They choices that one is faced with even before starting to blog is overwhelming. For example you have to choose your “host blogging tool” (Berger & Trexler, 2010, 107) before you can do anything, and that process in itself can be challenging. The challenges come when you have to decide on what ‘things’ you want in your blog and what blog tool will work best.
The initial set up is fairly straightforward to very complicated and the choices are endless. And for someone who is not very good at making decisions having so many choices of colors, layout, fonts, and design can be a real time waster. I found that I was always questioning my choices. Does this look professional enough? Is the color right? Is it easy to read for the reader? Should the title go here? What is my title? Gadgets, what are they?
At the beginning of working on my blog, I was very worried and nervous about putting my thoughts in writing. Now that I am working on my final post I am not very concerned about it at all and in fact I was thinking of starting a personal blog about how hard or easy it is to get back into running after a year and a half. I guess one fear has been overcome.
Getting back to the ingredients…adding photos, links and embedding videos is very easily done because most of the website are actually set up for you to share what you are doing. For example, once I created a Flickr account I was able to ‘send’ my photos from Flickr
to my blog with a click of a button. I was also able to embed a YouTube video into my blog because YouTube already had the code that I would need, so copy paste and it was there. Adding these little extras makes some blogs stand out from others.
I know that I have a long way to go, but with this class I feel that I have learned more than the basics to be able to start my own blog and keep posting.
Positives
• user friendly
• Links are easy to add
• Able to make it as secure as you would like
• A way to be heard
• A lot of choices with style, design, links
Negatives
• Sometimes there are too many choices for someone who is not good at making them
Teaching and Learning
After this positive experience with blogging I would love share with students what they can do with blogs. I am not 100% sure I would want to make it mandatory that students need to start a blog, but it would be a way for students to have a portfolio of there thoughts, ideas and general interests. If students were given much need guidelines, specific requirements, and class time I believe they would be on board with blogging. Housley (n.d) lists 7 benefits for kids as they enter into the blogosphere including responsibility and commitment, increased communication with friends and relatives, exposure to Internet technologies, improved writing skills, improved editing skills, improved spelling and typing. With the 7 benefits listed by Housley, it is hard to fight against blogging. It is a great tool to use in the classroom, but we as teachers must be well aware of what the purpose is for creating the blog. If we do not have an appropriate purpose then maybe creating a blog is not in the class’ best interest and then we would end up as this incredible statistic.
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled. (Quenqua, 2009, para. 4)
References
Berger, P. & Trexler, S. (2010). Choosing web 2.0 tools for learning and teaching in a digital world. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.
Housley, S. (n.d). Kids and blogging. Retrieved from http://www.blog-connection.com/blogs-kids.htm
Kist, W. (2010). The socially networked classroom: Teaching in the new media age. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Quenqua, D. (2009, June 5). Blogs falling in an empty forest. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/fashion/07blogs.html
