Proposal topic – A blog between two places

Digital tools and spaces to be used – Weebly.com

Rationale –

The concept for this digital story came from the desire to utilise the fact that I am in a different part of the world to many of my friends and family. Being in Dubai I often get asked a lot of questions and to share my different experiences with them. In my years of teaching I’ve seen a variety of schools and classes use technology to communicate and share with other classes in different countries or schools for units of work or over the course of a year, in my experience,533 this has been an engaging and helpful tool for students but is often limited to emails and sometimes web chat.

For this assignment I hope to create two ‘fictional’ blogs, one from the perspective of a character in Dubai and one from an Australian characters perspective as they explore comparisons between their two countries. This could be curriculum specific for the age group, for example, examining a famous person, comparing the environments, discussing their favourite sports or just how different life is. This resource could be used as an example for exploring letter writing in the digital age, to teach about blog creation, and to develop skills in any subject by sharing information and working collaboratively with each other. There are some websites where teachers can find class pen pals and many teachers rely on personal contacts to do the same thing.

The website I aim to create will show the different kinds of content you can use on a blog, video, images, text and comments. Weebly.com offers a fairly simple to use website creator with templates, apps and is tablet compatible for apple and android devices. It operates on a drag and drop basis which all students year 3 and up would be capable of using given some guidance and time to explore.