Wikis, Websties, Blogs

Photo from flickr.com by bjmcdonald

What are they good for? Lots of things. Discovering these technologies has expanded my teaching mind. They have opened new doors to creative and new ways for collaboration and lesson planning, as well as new ways of marketing myself for when I go job hunting.

In this course I've actually switched from using Weebly for my midterm, to Google Sites for my final. I don't really have a great reason why though. Weebly is so much more appealing to the eye and it's really easy to use. I gave up on Google Sites earlier in the semester because I couldn't figure it out. Nevertheless, I continued to work on it and decided to switch over. I use google for everything anyway. I use it for blogging, e-mail, Google Docs, Reader, so it just made sense to me to keep organized and to keep everything in one place. Google Sites has a lot more options for editing and inserting things like presentations, spreadsheets, pdf documents, etc, without having to use other websites like scribd.com.

As for using websites, blogs, and wikis with other educators, they provide you with so many more opportunities to learn from others, people that you don't actually ever have to meet. We can just do searches for these and find so many new ways of teaching. We may not have to ever meet, face-to-face, the authors of the wikis, websites, and blogs, but we can comment and collaborate that way. I actually follow a blog that has two authors and they don't even live in the same state.

As for the classroom and lesson planning, these technologies provide teachers with so many creative options. We can stray away from traditional ways of teaching somewhat and motivate the students by making lessons more fun with these technologies.