Here it is, The Blog of Eckhoff! I find it funny that it took a class for me to start one of these since the peer pressure for just such an action has been mounting over the past 2 years!
I think that this will be a very interesting experience both professionally and personally as I try to get away from emailing everybody with pictures, updates, assignments, etc. I love the fact that people can just pop over to a blog and get what they need at their convenience. Once I figure out the RSS feed system, there’ll be no stopping me!
The things I can do with this tool as a teacher seem endless! With commenting as a possibility, I can now successfully take class discussions out of the classroom, which will open up many an opportunity to my students but especially the shy ones that don’t speak up in class very much. Last year, I learned about embedding using slide share and youtube resources, which can also take this blog to new levels by combining different modes of expression both for the benefit of my teaching, and teacher reflection. My hope is to then pass these skills on to my students so that they can start their own blogs and complete projects that include print, audio, video, and pictures. I’ve directed assignments like this in the past, but with my limited technical know-how, they tended to be rather sloppy as we attempted to move from medium to medium by way of complicated equipment setup and time wasting transitions.
About the only downside I can see to this tool is the lack of knowlege in some of my students and their parents. Even with email as a communication tool, I ran into many families that were not adept enough to handle it. In fact, I have a moodle site that I currently use in my job and I’ve spent the past week trying to get my students oriented to it. This has proved to be rather challenging despite my many links, emails, and directions. Hopefully, down the line, I will be able to teach them enough skills to make all of this much easier.
As far as a personal blog goes, I have the perfect topic: Obnoxious Neighbors. In just the past 2 days I’ve had to listen to a string of expletives from across the way, watch as a scantilly clad man weeded his garden…while I was weeding mine, and deal with my garage mate (I live in a townhouse/condo) and all of her worthless garbage all over both halves of the garage. Last night, she leaned a bag of garbage on my car. I should start documenting all of this stuff. I think it could be very funny!
I think I’d better post this now and see what the rest of the class has come up with. Enjoy!
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