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Team Verbena Blog
Beth
Blogging in education can be an affordance for many types of activities.  Teachers and learners can both benefit from the critical reading, research, and reflective writing. All of the essential characteristics of meaningful blogs also create meaningful learning.  Blogs afford the opportunity for students to extend their learning by interacting with an authentic audience which also extends to the fact that students will need to understand and use these technology skills in many facets of their everyday lives. As with the most successful technology tools, blogs enable co-use and immediate feedback, and social interaction which are all instances of sharing that students enjoy in their social media and can find similar enjoyment of in the use of blogs in their learning. The Edublogs online Website is a current and progressive free tool with information and blog hosting that educators should consider when it is time to design learning that includes blogs. An information filled place to start for more ideas and reasons to incorporate blogs into your pedagogy would be the Edublog article: Ten Reasons Every Educator Should Start Blogging, featuring this infographic, created by the author of the article, Kathleen Morris:
Allison
I’ve only ever used blogs as a resource for myself as a teacher and not as a way for students to collaborate or show work online. I think that some of the possibilities are good but in quickly searching up possible blogs for students to read a lot of them seem to look dated. I know the information is the key piece but I worry about how students might respond to something that looks like it’s 10-15 years old. As far as creating their own blog I do think that this could be an interesting way to have students collect information throughout the year for world history. This medium would allow students to collect articles, information etc.. on all of the different topics that we study throughout the year and allow them to create a final product that summarizes all of the information we learned for the year.

Mickey
I’m a newcomer to this blogging, having never participated one and can’t recall reading one. I’m sure that I must have read one along the way but nothing sticks out in my mind. Furthermore, I’ve certainly never considered one in math. But the more that I think about it and looking at some different math blogs, I’m definitely warming up to the idea. What has led me to this is that fact that literacy in mathematics is  and a skill that under emphasized and would help students develop a deeper understanding of math. I could envision a blog where students have explain a strategy they used to solve a problem, or how they would go about solving it. Classmates would then be able to read and comment about other strategies. It would also be valuable to discuss what is happening in this movie clip and how it relates to math. Now, which tool gives me the affordance I’m looking for?

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