Reflecting on my Blog experience

Having now experienced writing my own blog I am more aware of the effort and level of understanding it takes to create a digital presentation other than a PowerPoint (especially one that is timestamped). It has been an interesting learning experience for this, I was engaged with what I was doing as I (like adolescents) find using technology very engaging. Thinking about my experience and how I could incorporate it into the secondary classroom I think a blog would be useful to use in anything that requires the creation of diary entries, as a blog is online and accessible to the teacher to check the students progress at anytime and the posts that you create are timestamped. A blog could be used in a subject like health or food technology where students keep a diary of food intake or similar. Or for my method psychology- a blog could be used as a homework tool where students are required to do summaries as homework, students could do it as a blog. It is important to remember that technology is only as good as the learning behind it.

From my expereience students are very engaged in activities that have to do with technology. Gee (2005) highlights, there is much to be said about videogames and their effectiveness when it comes to learning and thinking. He uses 36 principles to explain why games are great learning machines, that is they reflect important principles of learning and thinking that cognitive science has presented as being significant and applicable in our technologically derived worlds. I think that important learning can be achieved through any digital media. 

Reference:

Gee, J. (2005) ‘Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines’,  http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/documents/Game%20Paper.pdf cited 17/5/11.