Summing up my first Blogging experience

Me and my blog have had our ups and downs!

My first ever post was a joyous occasion, as I marvelled at my own skills and the blogging technology itself. Now I have a way to share my inner thoughts and queries with the masses. I couldn't wait to see what the masses might think! It also gave me an insight into the minds of my peers (very interesting!) and prompted me to question and develop my own ideas (social constrctivism at its best!). But unfortunately this love affair was short lived.

Blogging is very time-consuming, especially when you first start out and the thought that people are going to be reading and judging your personal ideas made me rephrase my posts over and over to get the right 'voice' accross. (I must say it has got easier over the couple of months I have been adding to my blog, now I just write whatever I'm thinking...I guess my voice has found its own feet!)

I am sure that reflecting on the course content at regular intervals would be a great way to scaffold our learning and develop our understanding from week to week. However I must admit I did not always have the time to post my own ideas and comment on other blogs every week. Even though the posts were not always on time my blog is a great overview of all that we have covered in this unit and evience that I am able to use the technology.

The feedback from the lecturer and other students did encourage me to develop my ideas on the issues covered further. The comments posed questions and different perspectives that I otherwise would not have considered, and are evidence of how social interaction develops understanding and creates collective intelligence. This was also true for comments I made on other peoples blogs; I did not just read them and move on to the next but related what was being said to my own ideas.

I found this particular platform quite easy to use and managed to embed links, and a useful RSS feed to my blog. I think the more you use a particular site the easier it becomes to embed all sorts of useful links and resources, because I have been using Wikispaces for my wiki more frequently I found that platform easier to use. You can check my wiki out here.

Through this experience I can see the uses of using blogs in the classroom. I would model the use of blogs from early primary using class blogs and perhaps wikis on articular projects or topics. For middle to upper primary, as the students literacy skills develop, blogs become a fantastic insight into the students thinking and provide a timeline of their developing understanding.

The students may struggle at first, as I did, to find their public voice but with time, support, and development of digital literacy and digital safety skills, the use of blogs and other Web 2.0 tools could become key to future primary classrooms.