Online Communities

More resources for defining and understanding the attributes of online learning communities:

Building Communities – Strategies for Collaborative Learning

What are the conditions for and the characteristics of online learning communities? (pdf download)

Secret Strategies

🙂

~julz

To blog or not to blog?

Dear OTLO Learners,

I thought you might find the following very intersting.

Enjoy!
Bethany (posting secretly as Julia)

🙂

In the Autumn 2006 issue of interactive educator (pdf), Wesley Fryer covers the pros and cons of both blogging and podcasting to help you decide if they are right for you and your students. His list of pros and cons include:

Pros

• safe content safely accessed
• inexpensive to create
• easy to keep parents informed
• easy for students to create
• fun

Cons

• takes time to create (taking time from other activities)
• needs more tech support
• potentially disruptive technology

What other pros and cons can you think of?

Consider your answer and read the article. Plus, here are a few resources just for you… Some come from the article and others are from me.
Blogs

• Applied Science Research A science blog by high school students
• Weblogg-ed A blog about blogs, podcasts, wikis and other K12 tech
• Blogging: It’s elementary A webquest to introduce kids to blogs. It’s for elementary students, but it has some great ideas that could also be used for high school.
• EduBlog Insights A K12 tech integration blog.

Blog Tools

• Learnerblog Free blog tool for students.
• Edublogs Free blog tool for educators based on same technology as our OTLO blog.

Podcast Resource

• Educational Podcast Network A compilation of educational podcasts and podcast tools.

Enjoy!  🙂

Hello OTLO Friends!

Welcome to WordPress.com and your OTLO blog. Your first task is to add a comment to this post. You can do that by clicking on the Comment link at the bottom of this post next to the Uncategorized link.

Then, you are off to create your own blog using the WordPress Tutorial in your Notebook and soon available from the Technology page on this blog site. See up there in the upper right hand corner?

Anyways, we hope you have a great time learning about the potential of this powerful blogging tool as well as the others we will be using for OTLO. Happy blogging!

🙂

~julia & bethany