Laura’s Blog

I just thought I would leave with some final thoughts about my experience with using edublogs and exploring diferent technologies over the past month before my blog gets marked for my university subject entitled ‘Current Issues and Applications in Educational Computing’.

My knowledge has truly expanded in the time that I have spent using my blog and researching ways to use eductional technology in the classroom. Consequently, I am sure to use all that I have learnt both now when on my pracs and in the future when I have a class of my own. As well as this, I am sure to especially integrate the use blogs and webquests into my classroom, both now and in the future, due to the knowledge that I have gained as a result of doing this subject at uni.

I have just visited Tim’s blog and on his blog he has a post on digital storytelling. This made me think that digital storytelling would be a great task to use in a webquest activity because it shows that students have engaged in the content area and thus has created something as a result. As Gaskill, McNulty & Brooks (2006) comment, a feature of a webquest is when “learners analyse a body of knowledge, transform it in some way and demonstrate in-depth understanding of the material by creating a final product that others can react or respond to” (p.133). Therefore, digital storytelling allows for students to do this. However, it would have to feature in a longer term webquest, because making a digital story that demonstrates in-depth understanding will take a longer period of time than just one lesson.

Ref. Gaskill, M., McNulty, A. & Brooks, D.W. (2006). Learning from WebQuests. Journal of Science Education and Technology. 15 (2), pp.133-136).

Dan has come across a really good technology that is an add on for Mozilla Firefox. This add on can change the physical appearance of a webpage to change the font colour, size etc. This add on is another tool that would make the internet more accessible to students with special needs. Consequently, making webquests more accessible to students with special needs also.