Asynchonousity

In her blog post, Katie LaRue hit upon the idea of  the asynchronous nature of blogs. I wanted to expand on this topic because this is a key positive for using blogs in the classroom.

When you use a blog in a class, it is not necessary for anyone to be doing anything at the same time. This means that blogs are asynchronous. This aspect of blogs (and other forms of online collaboration) is very helpful for differentiation in classrooms. We know intuitively as teachers that our students do not all think at the same pace, and there are some excellent comments and questions that our students might be able to add to the discussion that never get addressed because the class has "moved on". The blogging platform allows all of our students to add to classroom discussions when they otherwise couldn't.

Beyond our own classrooms

Last year at one of our overly long staff meetings, I was involved in a staff-wide discussion about the morning announcements. Many faculty members were discontented about the intrusive, long announcements that often interrupted learning activities. I thought that I had an optimal solution for everyone. I was willing to have students record the announcements in my room, where I would post the audio file on the school website. This would give all the teachers an opportunity to play the announcements when it best fit into their personal class time best.

This idea was quickly, loudly and roundly rejected. Mostly, the teachers did not like this idea because it was one more task that they would have to remember to do; something new added to their routine. I would imagine I would get the same reaction if I proposed a school-wide blogging program.

Of course, it is not necessary for all teachers to have a blogging program in order for me to implement one in my classroom. However, I feel the transition to such a non-traditional idea would be smoother if students were participating in blogs in many (if not all) of their classes, and it was not something they had to remember just for Mr. O'Hara's class. Additionally, if many teachers in the building were learning how to utilize blogs in their classroom at the same time, there would be a much more robust support structure for each individual to lean on.

So the question I bring up is: what would a school-wide blogging initiative look like, and how could someone get most of the faculty to join in without earning the resentment of many teachers that see this new opportunity instead as a new "requirement". Of course, this question could be expanded to pretty much any novel classroom tool or procedure, and is central to the implementation of nearly all classroom technologies.

Are we late to the party?

I love Dropbox.

For anyone that doesn't know, Dropbox is a cloud storage service. You can install it on your computers, phone and tablet, and anything you save to the "Dropbox" folder (just like you might save it to "My Documents"), and it the file is automatically available on all your connected devices. For instance, if you take a picture on your phone, it we already be on your computer when you get home.
You can also share your Dropbox folders and make them publicly available.

Anyway, another feature of Dropbox is that you can create shared and public folders that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere, or restricted by password or by user name. This is clearly superior to using a blog as an online portfolio, especially if the student is submitting anything other than text or images to his or her portfolio.

I don't point this out to marginalize blogs as a useful educational tool, there are still plenty of other uses and aspects to blogging that can be incredibly useful in a classroom. I use this example to illustrate the extreme difficulty of teaching practical technology use. Someone can spend a lot of time figuring out how best to use one tool to accomplish their goals, only to one day be exposed to a different tool that does the same thing better.

As teachers, this is of great importance to us. Since it is almost guaranteed that our students will be on the cutting edge of technology, it is imperative that we be there as well, and being on the cutting edge of technology means constant change.

First Post

public class HelloWorld {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, World");
    }

}