- I have been using Google Reader for about a year now, so I cannot give an recent account of my early impressions. However, I did not use it very often at first. It was not until I subscribed to cute with chirs that is mostly pictures and some very light reading that I started to use it more often. It gave me a reason to want to check the reader which also helps me keep up with it. The one thing about the RSS readers are that if you do not keep up with them then it is almost impossible to catch back up. The mark all as read button is nice, but since it keeps statistics on how many you read I feel bad about pushing the button. A recent use I have found for the reader is: I would like to reduce our interest rate, so I added a news feed from google news about mortgage rates so I can stay on top of the news. Another great use I have found for the reader was putting the blog addresses of my classmates in and any of the addresses to the comment sections that I have made comments to so I can keep up. Checking each blog for new comments every day it a lot of work... work that the reader was created to prevent!
- I don't think Dales Cone (Dale, 1969) has a section that describes Blogging and RSS as a technology in itself. It seems that one would need to design their educational use in order to decide what learning experience it will provide.
Blogging could be used as a resource of visual symbols (Dale, 1969) that talk about Direct Purposeful Experiences (Dale, 1969) in a blog that students could read and learn these stories could also include Recordings, Still Pictures or motion pictures (Dale, 1969) to help "reconstruct the reality of the past" (Dale 1969, p.121). It could also however be used for students to journal about their own experiences allowing them to help solidify their own direct purposeful experiences (Dale, 1969) by displaying the in visual symbols (Dale, 1969) - Not being in a K-12 classroom it is hard for me to come up with a problem to which blogs or RSS feeds might be the answer (Postman, 1993) so I will have to think back to my own experiences and of what I do hear from K-12 educators as problems in their classrooms.
I think that parental involvement is a problem in schools today. Making it easier for parents to be involved in what their students are doing is important to the overall success of a child’s education both inside and outside of the classroom. Posting as much work as possible on a blog, doing recorded oral or video projects and linking them to an RSS feed can help parents keep track of work and even share it with family and friends which can motivate students who may not have a direct roll model in the home, but an aunt or grandparent who may live in another state that can help encourage these students in their work. As older generations become more tech savvy this could benefit shut-ins who could feel good about making a difference in the lives of younger children.
Schools could also take advantage of RSS feeds by posting classroom and school updates and announcements that parents could be linked to. No more worrying about notes getting lost on the way home. A limitation to this technology is that there are still home that do not own computers or internet connections which would make it hard to equally use this technology.
RSS feeds are the automatic download of preselected source updates. This can apply to podcasts, blogs or websites. Dale (1969) does not have anything that specifically applies to the automatic retrieval and storage of academic sources because short of a personal assistant, such things did not exist in 1969. Similar to what the blog could provide in learning experiences such as Motion pictures, visual symbols that are descriptions of direct purposeful experiences, contrived experiences, dramatized experiences (Dale, 1969). RSS feeds could also provide virtual exhibits (Dale, 1969) by allowing students to see videos of places they have never been and may never be able to see in real life. A great example of an educational RSS feed that could be described as a virtual exhibit of the white house and its history found at http://www.whitehousehistory.org/podcasts/index.html. A great example of dramatized experiences would be This American life by Chicago public radio found at http://www.thislife.org/.
Dale, E. (1969). Audiovisual methods in teaching. New York: Dryden Press. Chapter 4: The Cone of Experience
Postman, N. (1993). Of Luddites, learning, and life. Technos Quarterly, 2(4).
Siegel, M. (2003). Falling asleep at your keyboard: The case for computer imagnation. Unpublished manuscript.
10 comments:
I agree that parental involvement is a problem. I especially notice this at the high school level. I think that the easier we can make it for parents to be involved the more participation we will see. Parents are busy, period. So I also agree with you that providing online resources and tools can aid in this involvement. The fact that not everyone has a computer at home will always be a problem when it comes to technology. However, I think that if you combine online resources with calls home or things of that nature would greatly improve family involvement.
~Nicole Gilliland
Thanks for the insight on the mortgage rate RSS. I am looking to buy a different house so that is going to help me out.
I agree 100% when you talk about parent involvement. So many parents I know feel that the teacher isn't doing a good enough job and that the teacher needs to do more when really the parent needs to be more active. I think that could happen through blogs for parents. They could blog with other parents and the teacher too.
Katherine,
First let me thank you for your help setting up an RSS reader this week. The videos or screen casts, or whatever they are called were great.
Like you, I am also not in K-12 and it was/is difficult for me to come up with a proper or good use for the RSS reader and blogging technologies. Of course, my limitations are exacerbated by my own personal knowledge and skill, or lack of, with these items.
I totally agree with your point about all households not having a computer and/or internet access. It’s true. When people or an organization become so emerged in technology I think it becomes easy for them to forget the people who are not. Quite frankly, some of this technology not only requires internet access but high speed internet access, and for some families that cost is too high.
Thank you,
Jeff Tyler
I borrowed your idea of putting in classmates blogs and I too have found this to be a great tool. I was checking each classmates blog daily to see if there are any updates to them and it got a little tiresome. I do notice that it does not show a change in comments though just the posts that they make the same. Since you have more experience with this and also struggled in the begining with how many updates you were receiving, how did you help to solve this? Is there a way to subscribe to specific news updates instead of all news updates?
Jennifer
I liked your thought about how you can use the blogs to keep up to date on the mortgage rates. Great idea.I do ponder how schools are going to handle the fact that not everyone has a computer at home.
Jennifer,
If you click on the the comments page for the blogs that you have responded to, you copy the URL and add it to your feed. I made a folder in my reader so I can just put all the 5410 feeds in the folder and I dont have a list of 500 feeds for the class.
I'm going to put a little twist on this discussion. I also believe that the lack of parental involvement is effecting school performance, however I also believe that too much parental involvement can inhibit students from learning and growing. Instead of always catching them, parents need to let their children fall from time to time. Letting a student pick themselves up after a bad situation is a good thing. Parents can't be there all the time, and I doubt (and hope) these parents follow their students to college. Students need to grow up, and high school is the perfect time to do that.
Patrick,
I could not agree more... Helecopter parents can be worse than those who don't care at all. The problem is that even the helecopter parents dont seem to care about the important things like what their children are learning. They only care about what you are not doing that they thing you should be to serve their children even though they may not know what they are talking about.
Good job finding a “Cone” fit for blogs and RSS feeds. I checked out the URL’s you mentioned and they were great, especially the White House Story. I got side tracked checking it out and didn’t get to my responding as quickly as I meant to.
You are right about parental involvement being a problem in schools today. Heck, I think parental involvement in the child’s life in general is a bigger problem but don’t get me started. I live in a somewhat rural community but I was none-the-less surprised at the percentage of students with no or intermittent internet access. Usually the students will report that they are “temporarily” off line or they have it at dads house. It is usually/always a money thing. I think you making student announcements and updates available via RSS feeds is great in theory but I can’t rely on it because of my off-line students and that’s a bit frustrating.
By the way, I didn't know you could pick the stories to be fed. I'm going to check it out.
Joe Sobeske
I loved your idea about sharing students work through the internet. The question is whether the benefits of this would be worth the effort. If the students had time to do it themselves I see how it could be a wonderful experience. I could see a grandma who lives in Florida making wonderful comments about the work that her grandchildren are doing. This could be both an positive effect of using the internet and even bring families closer. I also liked your idea about RSS feeds. I have yet to think of a topic where I am that concerned about updates, but when I do I can see some of their value. Thanks for being a good partner this past week. I hope you have recovered from Jury Duty. -Matt
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