C4T#1p (Silvia Tolisano)

"Blogging as Pedagogy: Facilitate Learning"

On her website, Langwitches, Silvia Tolisano blogs about teaching right now and in the future through technology. In this post she talks about how blogs can be an important tool used as Pedagogy. She uses another writer's definition (Ann Davis) to describe the term as "The strategies, techniques, and approaches that teachers can use to facilitate learning." This is an interesting way to view blogging, but it is one that we have quickly adapted in our own EDM310 class. I had never wrote blog posts prior to this course but have now used it as an essential educational tool.

Tolisano breaks down four primary areas that Blogging supports:
1)Reading 
2)Writing 
3)Reflecting 
4)Sharing

She then goes into further detail with each one of the categories in order to show the large amounts of benefits that come from Blogging in an educational setting. I found her comment on Reading to be very applicable when she stated that it "becomes a personalized content experience versus one size fits all approach." By having the content individualized for each student's blog, they will be more interested in the topic and therefore more willing to learn about it. The Writing portion also shows the effect of having your work in the public space. Since the writer of the blog will be viewed and critiqued by others from all around the world, they want to create the best form of their writing possible. 

Through this post she shows how the act of Blogging is an effective educational tool that can target multiple teaching skills with one assignment. I can see the overwhelming positive aspects of this Blogging method being adopted in education's future. 

And You Thought it Could Not Be Done: Blogging in Math

In this post, Ms. Tolisano looks at how a math class has begun using a blog for their classwork. She is very excited and surprised that a math class has been able to incorporate the use of a blog because of the numerical aspects needed to be shown. 

She states, "The Math teacher instinctively understood that blogging is not just about writing. It is about “presenting” your work, your thoughts and products to a large audience FOR feedback. Blogging is a platform that allows students to think about their Math work." This is an important outlook on blogging; the students are now able to show their classmates the process of how they came up with the answer and are now able to get feedback on whether they made a mistake. This can be a very effective method of not only allowing students to help others in the class, but also retain it even more through the act of teaching it.

I really enjoyed the portion of this post when she shows the feedback of the students in these classes. It shows, similar to EDM310, how they are able to give instant analysis of their classmates' work. Whether it was a title needing to be corrected, offering up helpful websites for their classmates to use, or even just giving positive feedback on a job well done, the use of a blog by these students shows how effective the creation of an "online community" is for the classroom.