Welcome to the Professional Development Module for Blogs & Wikis. This page will guide you through the rest of the module.. Feel free to email me with your questions, concerns, or suggestions. Once you have completed the module, please click on the "Survey" tab at the top of the page to complete a survey on this module.
You will also find a "Tip Sheet" of Reminders on the Site Map for future reference.
A blog is a website that will allow users (teachers, parents, and students) to journal their thoughts, concerns, suggestions, and post comments to classroom discussions. The main blog website we will be looking at is Blogger.
You will click on the "Blogs" tab to the top (or right) of this page to get started. Make sure you work in sequential order of the items listed. You may refer back to them at any time. I have included several examples of how blogs can be used in the classroom. Students can respond to the blog questions in class or as homework.
The first that that you will need to do is create a user account in blogger. Instructions will be on the blogger module.
You can find more information and examples at Edublogs:
According to "Teachers First" a wiki is a web site that lets any visitor become a participant: you can create or edit the actual site contents without any special technical knowledge or tools. All you need is a computer with an Internet connection. A wiki is continuously “under revision.” It is a living collaboration whose purpose is the sharing of the creative process and product by many. One famous example is Wiki-pedia, an online encyclopedia with no “authors” but millions of contributors and editors. The word "wiki" comes from Hawaiian language, meaning "quick" or "fast.
What is the difference between a wiki and a blog?
A blog, or web log, shares writing and multimedia content in the form of “posts” (starting point entries) and “comments” (responses to the posts). While commenting, and even posting, are open to the members of the blog or the general public, no one is able to change a comment or post made by another. The usual format is post-comment-comment-comment, and so on. For this reason, blogs are often the vehicle of choice to express individual opinions.
A wiki has a far more open structure and allows others to change what one person has written. This openness may trump individual opinion with group consensus. (retrieved from www.TeachersFirst.com).
We will review two wiki sites during our explorations and there will be examples of lessons within these module.
The first thing you will need to do is create a "free" user account in PBWorks and/or wikispaces. Instructions will be on the Wiki module.