Blogs are an on line writing tools that allow people to express their feelings or raise a question. The last blog written is the first one in the list. With blogs people can respond and make comments on what other people post. They are dated posts so anyone who reads it can see when the blog was written. They can be anywhere from one to two sentences to be really long. People express the thoughts and feelings on something they think or in response to someone else. A good use for this that I like from the book was the book study option. I think that it would be good to provide a prompt from a book being read and challenge students to think about what they read. I think communicating with other classes reading the same book would help to expand the learning of the students because they get even more views on the questions they are blogging about. If the students could blog and communicate with the author that would be very exciting for them and educational. Wiki's are content that has been placed on the Internet but anyone can go in and add, remove, or change something that someone has written in it. There a host sites that provide templates that allow people to create their own wiki but it is open to others to change, add to, and remove things. Some of the host sites anyone can contribute to what someone else as created but there are some available that allow the creator to limit the ability of others to view and contribute to the pages. A classroom use is to give instructions for a class projects. The wiki can be used to provide all students with the necessary information to complete the project as well as the links need to other resources that will help them with the project. Work-based word processors allow people to create word processing documents on line and save them there so that they always have access to their work where ever they are. The documents can be edited, created, and stored on line and if it is appropriate and the person choses to they can publish it on line. The documents can be private but if the person who creates its wishes to share it with others. When they share it with others they can choses to either have the person they share it with read it only or they can chose to have the person collaborate and make changes. A use in the classroom I really liked was the round-robin writing. I think that this would be a fun activity for the students to create a story that they were all able to contribute to. The story would be creative and every student would add their own ideas to the story which could create a very interesting story because all the students would think differently and the story could go in any direction.
Do you have personal experience with any of these tools? If so, please describe that experience. If not, please explain why you have not used these tools.
The only tool that I have had experience with is the blogging, and that was just the blogging that we are doing here in class. Up to the point I have never really had a need to use any of these tools so I really have not looked into them. As I have expressed before, I really do not like expressing my feeling or thoughts on the Internet and for the word processing I have just always used Microsoft Word. The web-based word processing would have been very useful when I was an undergraduate though. It would have saved me from e-mailing work I did at home to myself and saving it on a computer lab computer in order to work on it in the computer lab or where ever I was at. I can see how these might be useful in the classroom to help students interact through technology. Once I get into a classroom I will have a reason to use it so I may get more familiar with these programs.
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