Blogs in Education

1. The results are fairly similar when I searched for Education Blogs using Google, Live, and Yahoo. The top result in each search engine was educational.blogs.com. After that, there were some differences for the top results, but generally, each search engine had similar results at different parts of the page.
2. Blogs can be used in the classroom to help teachers and students have a “sound board.” It gives students the opportunity to give ideas and thoughts about topics in the classroom. Another blog is used with video conversations. It is always available, and it gives people the opportunity to share ideas with each other. Also, people can save the videos, so one can view them later. Another teacher used the website “Animoto.” This website gave the teacher the opportunity to add photos, music, and a slideshow. This gives students the opportunity to view a slideshow if they’re sick, or wanted to see it again.
3. RSS readers and aggregators help people save time on the internet. Instead of going to individual sites for the news, one can view many links of the pages in a separate browser or location. If I wanted my students to use a variety of news sources for a project, I could give them the list of websites to put into their RSS; this would give the students an easy way of sorting through the websites.
4. Blogging and RSS readers will ease the availability of various resources to students. The RSS reader will help students have set of websites that give students easy access. Furthermore, blogs will help students communicate with each other easier. If a student has a problem, he can go online to the blog to communicate with other students. This will help students with privacy concerns, as they will not have to worry about giving away contact information. Furthermore, it gives more access to teachers for students.
5. Blogs and RSS readers can be beneficial to classrooms, but they do have their drawbacks. First, if a student does not have easy access to technology, she will be disadvantaged. Another issue is that the internet can go down, so students may not be able to access a specific blog. Positives of the RSS readers and blogs are they give students and teachers easy ways of communicating with each other in a forum. Another advantage is that students will be able to organize specific websites easier, as they will have a list to go through.

Learning Styles

According to the test, I am naturalistic and logical. Naturalists find common traits among items and rank the items by significance. Logical people analyze abstract ideas and attempt to find consistency. I enjoy spending time outdoors, so this helps to show why I enjoy nature. When I learn or walk around, I am often analyzing situations. Generally, I try to see how to improve the efficiency of situations by breaking down systems into their components. For example, if I am walking, I will look at the fastest route; I will look at varying factors: how direct the route is and the obstacles associated with the route.
Logical students generally like to analyze problems mathematically. This could be self-discovery learning. For example, a student may need to determine where pi comes from. A teacher would have the students measure the circumference and diameter, then divide the circumference by the diameter. Naturalistic students want to organize and sort information. In the classroom, a student may want to find properties of a leaf, and then explain how this makes the two leafs different.
I will support logical students by offering open-ended assignments. I will let the students make their own inductions about the information they are learning. Furthermore, the students can debate with other students to help express their opinions. For naturalistic students, I will provide ways of showing ideas visually. While doing a pre-write explanation in class, I could draw the “spider web,” where students will connect ideas of a draft visually.
Technologies to support the logistical intelligence are generally based in mathematics. For example, while doing a lab, students could use a measuring scale to compare the various masses of rocks. In this same lesson, naturalistic students may want to use a microscope so they could visually see the differences on the rocks.
My attention to multiple intelligences will affect how interested my students are in the topics. To grasp my students’ interest, it is necessary to have them understand. If I am not teaching to their intelligences, then I am losing portions of their abilities to understand.