Web 2.0 and blogging

A comment on RSS for educators (Hendron, 2008)

“Welcome to the new web”
Again I was stumped by jargon. The first sentence of this reading clarified the acronym RSS as Really Simple Syndication, however I am reading a book at the moment, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (Richardson, 2006) which defines it as Rich Site Summary. It is probably a minor difference but it shows that like many areas of Education, people who are involved with Educational Technology use terminology to mean different things. Just like the many different understandings of the term ICT. As a student this is something that I need to get my head around and will become clearer as I learn more about e-learning.

An aspect of using blogs in education that I had not thought of before was as a way for teachers to communicate with parents. At school we have an intranet that students can access to check homework, look at exemplars, access readings and resources etc. However, the class pages are not able to be accessed by parents unless their child gives them their id and password. Using a blog would allow parents individual access and the ability to see what the class have been learning and how they can support their child with this. It would also mean that parents would not have to communicate with the teacher directly. I just wonder how New Zealand teachers would feel if they were required to maintain a blog as teachers are in Goochland County, Virginia. Some teachers are teaching up to 5-6 classes per day. Would they be expected to update the blog for every class, every time they taught them? We haven’t had all teachers buy into our school intranet, so I’m pretty sure that the same thing would happen with blogs.

My understanding of Web 2.0 has also developed. Web 2.0 according to this reading is the read/write web. Users are able to manipulate content without knowledge of html. However, according to the first chapter of How to Use Web 2.0 in your library (bradley, 2007), What is Web 2.0?, the definition is "not easy to pin down" and not that simplistic. I guess it's not the definition that counts it is how we use the tools Web 2.0 provides to create new and deeper learning experiences for our students.

This portal supplements the book How to Use Web 2.0 in your library.