My exploration to different sites; as Epsilen, Foliotek, Google blog came to one result: let them be my affordances. They became my affordances to facilitate more learning; I was not hesitant to engage to other sites and within the same sites I explored without hesitation.
Blogging is a way of communicating. No barriers in the way. We can create a community where we can post our intrests, our comments, ideas, suggestions, and most of all; our everyday life in the classroom, in the home, in the community in general. We and our students, apart and together we can create communities, our own, theirs and ours. In later years, we can reflect, compare technology, see the changes in ourselves, our community keep in touch, see where we are in our personal life.
Another reason for blogging is to comment with subjects of our preferences, make the affordances of blogs ideal for students and teachers to share.
Debates, novel reading, journalism, ESL, Bilingual groups.
ESL/Bilingual groups will share reading materials, they will be helping each other on their assignments they will become teachers, and affordances become tools to facilitate learning.
Classical reading will be of pleasure, books of William Shakespeare and Jane Austin will be the affordances to learning. We will be exploring places, Parisian novels will take us to the small beautiful streets of Paris and Shakespeare to the canals of Venice or the mountains of Greece.
My favorite one will be the genealogical tree; share, history while we are researching it, where we come from, which European country, or not, our family began the creation. Excitement for the students, similarities and differences will surface, affordances become ideal for this technology.
I will use blogging, due to what I know now, enough and not, to allow me of making a different choice, if I was asking my students to create a blog or an efolio, I will ask them to bring more to the table, they probably can become the teachers and we all can learn together. Later in my studies of Educational Technology I will know more to be able to make a better or a different choice. I am found of blogging for now; all students can be heard, give the time needed to the ones naturally timid, to express their opinion without barriers. Blogging will bring out the good sides of students, we will make blogging fun, we will make it "the classroom", not the typical classrom. Blogging focusses on interaction and learning from each other. Technology makes us One. Technology has no barriers. Technology is freedom.
OBSTACLES:
The only obstacle I can predict; socioeconomically; we will have different backgrounds to battle with; here is the barrier to technology. Families with low income or families with great number of children will not be able to provide technology for them. Schools have to find funding to provide technology to students or technology has to be adjusted to fit the school day.
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