Shavua Tov!

Well, with ten hours 'til the deadline for this assignment I thought that there's no time like the present...oh online courses and procrastination...

I chose to focus on the three blogs

• The Innovative Educator
• Learning with "e"s
• The Web 0.2 Connected Classroom

Why? Erm because they're pretty. Seriously. Perhaps not the best way to choose which websites to glean information from but a blog has to be easy on the eye in order for me to contemplate reading it...

And what have I learnt this week (tonight) from these blogs?

The Innovative Educator -> I actually read a short blog about how students use cell phones for learning and how wonderful that is (http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.co.il/2013/02/finally-research-based-proof-that.html). 

Apart from the obvious flaws in the conditions in which the research was carried out that readers brought up in the comments, such as the fact that the results are based on an online survey and the survey was carried out by a mobile phone carrier (!), I did not find the results as heartening as the author of the blog. She claims that such findings show that educators have reason to rejoice- after all students are using their mobile phones to help them do their homework and not just for entertainment purposes. 

I think that many times students will use the internet as a short cut- to gain superficial information on a subject- enough to get by on without really understanding the subject matter in depth. I think this is one of the drawbacks of the internet and its wide-spread use. 

Additionally, having students say that it "helps" them complete maths homework just makes me think that they used their computer to do things that they can't be bothered doing in their heads. This, in my eyes is not the meaning of using technology positively in order to educate. This is the way to create students who are lazy, rely on the internet for...everything and aren't able to perform simple mathematical problems by themselves.

On the other hand the post http://steve-wheeler.bloghttp://blog.web20classroom.org/2013/02/the-administrator-pr-machine.html#disqus_threadspot.co.il/2013/03/gold-mines.html on "Learning with "e"s from March 4th seemed to come to prove to me that internet and technology can be used in fantastic ways and may not just create passive students. In fact, the blogger spoke about fascinating social media projects that educators take advantage of, allowing their students to do things such as blog online sharing creative writing pieces (see the blog 100 Word Challenge) or their personal stories (The Quadblogging Project). These fabulous sites are great examples of how educators can use social media to their advantage to create thinking, creative, enthusiastic learners.

Lastly, I checked out the "Blogging about the Web 2.0 Connected Classroom" and quite liked the post named "The Administrator PR Machine (http://blog.web20classroom.org/2013/02/the-administrator-pr-machine.html#disqus_thread) from Feb 6th. Although the blog did not teach me something mind-blowing about technology, I did like the idea of the author that technology can and should be used for PR. Staff members will often see special moments that parents and others in the outside world are not privy to and capturing those moments and sharing them with the outside world I'd imagine does great things for a school. Obviously one has to think about ethically what one can and cannot share and issues of the privacy of pupils, but on the whole I think that the author has a point- in a place of learning there are many, many special moments that can be shared in order to show those outside what goes on in your school. Oh, and I finally checked what Instagram is. Is it just me or as many of these devices kind of...similar? Or maybe I just don't understand the difference between them all yet....

Either way, I'm done for today...have a great week!