Back to Blogs

I'm enjoying reading other people's blogs and learning their ideas. An extension of Madison and Lexie's comments about big brother (don't want to scare you any more girls, but..).  These blogs are a useful way to monitor people's thinking and thought processes, so for teachers in a classroom situation you can use them for assessment.

Most of us seem to be leaning towards social constructivism as an effective teaching and learning theory. If I connect that with the video by Sir Ken Robinson we saw in Aboriginal Education about changing the paradigm of education - the old system was set up several hundred years ago to prepare people to work in an industrialised society and was based on transmitting knowledge that people needed to know to function in that society.  Since then, the nature of society has changed and the collective knowledge of the world has increased exponentially.  The primary school curriculum is looking pretty crowded to me these days and the focus in teaching seems to be shifting towards stimulating and getting students to reach their potential - teaching students how to think and not in a big brother way, more how to process, connect and use information - to develop critical literacy in all the subjects.

(I know you can get the video from webct but I really liked it and I wanted to try embedding so here it is:)




Therefore, I can see how blogs can be a useful tool for assessing how our students are thinking, processing, connecting and using our lessons (and whether we are stimulating them to reach their full potential).

Blogs are also an example of collaborative learning, I've learnt tons from other people's blogs. I can see an application of this in the classroom - by students following each other's blogs they can learn  from each other. This doesn't have to be just from the student's in your own class either, you can collaborate with another class anywhere in the world to get a different perspective.