When searching for the ‘educational wikis’ and ‘educational blogs’ Google and yahoo seemed to give me very similar results. The search in dogpile.com gave me a lot more ‘sponsored results’ meaning that these results are at the top of the list because they paid money or advertise dogpile.com on their site in return for their site to appear at the top of the results list on dogpile.com.
1. A) One site that I thought was interesting you could search by subject and then you can choose to join the group that you were a part of. This was a good security measure, if you were directed to the site and had a password then you could join.
B) After that you and any other members could interact with one another. This is a good way to get the parents of your students involved which can also be a great resource for you. Community support can make the classroom more interesting.
C) A future use I can see for this is to work on project between several schools within (or out) of a district. An example I can think of is say you were doing water testing, you could get several school’s biology classes (you could even include a buddy program going with middle school students) together to collect from as many sources from around the area. Then as a group you could put your results together and get a seriously comprehensive experiment and the students get a lot of interaction with others whom they may have never met before.
2. Both the RSS readers and aggregator are software used by subscribers to get up to date stories, blogs, and or headlines delivered to your computer. So instead of going to several different sites looking for these things they come to you. Basically it is a way to get things faster and more efficient without doing any work. Each one of these serves the same purpose to be able to collect and deliver news to you so you don’t have to go get it!
This can be useful in the classroom because as teachers we don’t always have time to go out and find interesting stories so we subscribe to whatever sites provide us with useful information usually then the stories come to us and we can forward the really good one on to students!
3. Two pros of wikis and blogs in education are the connection the students share with one another and the teacher. Also you can use them for group work, planning a field trip, or just a forum for the students to use each other if they need assistance. Two cons that wikis and blogs pose in education are firstly not all of your students may not have regular access to the internet rendering all of this useless. Lastly another con of wikis and blogs is that if you don’t make sure that each wiki and or blog you use is secure there is a possibility that what your students are reading is not appropriate which can also get you in trouble as a teacher.
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