Blogs, Wikis Chapter 6 Reflection

After reading this chapter I think what has changed in my thinking about technology in teaching is the use of Twitter. Before reading this I hadn’t really thought about its uses in a school setting. Previously I thought of kind of a mix between a social network site and blogging that was really used to for people to keep track of each other, follow news, or just to find funny stuff to read about. I still have to admit I think that it is a waste of time. The collaboration ideas I hadn’t thought before how it could be used to run through ideas and get others feedback. I can see how it could be useful in the right situation to have students tweet questions to you that they may not want to ask in class. They then could get feedback not only from you, but potentially other students in the class on whatever is they ask or it could be a thought they propose perhaps on their analysis of the meaning of a passage in some literature. I had never really heard of the Diigo site until this chapter and for that matter Delicious until this fall. I have a bit of experience with Digg and I wonder if they are related in some way to each other, however with Digg you just placed comments on links or used a function similar to the like button on Facebook. Diigo seemed kind of neat in the way that you can annotate websites, in that way it is an improvement over Digg. I can see the value in that particularly if I assigned students to look at a website and I wanted them to key in on certain areas. On the other hand they could give feedback to me and the rest of the class what areas of confusion were or questions and comments they had. My experience with Delicious so far has mostly been just in the form of collecting links for the assignment, I have yet to really delve into using for retrieving from to heavily, but I can see down the road this semester and most like next it may come in handy.

I think how this has affected my future teaching is that sites like Diggo I may be able to use to clarify and guide my students while using the web. They will also be able to get feedback to me and other students on what their thoughts are. I really don’t think that reading this will change my view on the use of Twitter in the classroom yet, but with some possible convincing I may be open to changing my mind on the whole thing. The “wild west” as the book puts it still frightens me a bit in the accountability terms in regards to using it in school.