Week One Reflections

This blog is now setup for the CI5351 class at the University of Minnesota. The main purpose of tongiht's class was to introduce up to the class and our first technology tool for educators, the blog. It's unlikely that I'll use a standalone blog such as this in the classes I currently teach. I already use the University's WebVista system for the classes and based on prior experience requiring students to look on multiple sites for information about a class generally results in confusion. I have noticed though that in the latest version of WebVista there is now support for blogging within WebVista which presents some interesting possibilities.

Based on discussions with other teachers in the past blogs are often seen as a resource used by the teacher to remind students of upcoming project deadlines, homework assignments and to provide resources and links, especially to multimedia content and other websites, which supplement learning in the classroom. While this is a good first step in the future I expect that more schools and classrooms, especially Language Arts classrooms, will take advantage of blogs created by students-for students though there are some potential data privacy landmines with students which must be navigated by school districts before this becomes commonplace. Because students entereing high school today are likely to already be familiar with reading, if not writing, blogs they are likely to be interested in sharing their thoughts and developing ideas on the blog as a sort of public journal of their journey through a class.