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.
Hi Sharon,
I think that using Weebly will work simply for you, but I’m wondering why you don’t create your blogs on a blog-making space, like Edublogs (which is the basis for Thinkspace, so you’re experienced with it) I may not be understanding, and you are able to incorporate “blog-type” elements in a Weebly space.
The idea is good. Do you intend that it be used as an exemplar for students to use to create a similar thing? I think you need to make this proposal more specific, i.e. what year, what subject, what curriculum purpose will be blog serve? That is, decide it’s for, say, Year 8 Geography, and relate it to a topic that allows you to look at Dubai and Sydney – wherever you can make it fit a real purpose for students and teachers.
Hope this helps.
Lee
INF533 SC
I think the advantage of Weebly for this particular project is that you can have more than one blog within a Weebly site so it will work perfectly for the two fictional blogs proposed.
Sounds like an interesting story, I’m looking forward to reading it.
Heather
Thanks Heather. And thats exactly why I ended up going with Weebly because it was easier to have the 2 blogs in one place and its a platform I’ve used before.