Thursday, April 18, 2013

PEDAGOGICAL potentials of BLOGS


The development of teaching and learning has been an interactive yet effective way in delivering the knowledge to the students. There are many significant benefits that we can learn from the features in blog to ourselves and to the readers from the students site. As the world evolves, it seems that the usage of technology has been spread and widely used in the field of education. There are many features of the blog that we can find it as beneficial but at the same time some of them can give harm to us too. For example, we can always use the blog's features consists of picture, video, audio, widgets, links, comments and also the graphic banner to make our teaching and learning become efficient.

PICTURE

- As we all know, the students are more attracted to pictures rather than words. By using the blog, we can easily put as many pictures as we like to teach something to our students without having worried that they might feel bored. The usage of pictures and sometimes the animated pictures make the students become more interested to learn something.

VIDEO

- By using blog, we can also put the educational video in it not just from Youtube but also the blog that we made by ourselves. For example, as for me as an English teacher, when I'm teaching the use of countable and uncountable nouns, rather than just bringing the realia in class, I can use the video of cartoons showing and compare the nouns.

AUDIO

- As for audio, we cannot directly put the audio in our blog, but we have to embed it first. But not to worry as there are always site or online software that we can use in embedding our audio that we are going to use in making the teaching and learning process succeed.

WIDGETS


- Widgets are another features of blog that helps us to help the students. For example, there are widgets of educational games that we cam embed in our blog and also, there are informational widgets such as clock, calendar and prayer time that will indirectly teach the student to appreciate time more.

LINKS

- What is meant by the usage of links in our blog here is, sometimes, we need to give further explanation on something related to what we are going to deliver in our particular post and the best way to do that is by giving links related to the post. For example, we can easily link our post to the file in Scribd or Slideshare without the student having to open the main page first before they can open the file.

COMMENTS

- Comments in blog is not that efficient compared to the way we can comment in Facebook and Twitter. Sometimes, there are blogs that need approval of the owner of the blog first to comment or we need to follow them first so that we can comment on the post. We have to sign in to our email first for the notifications of the comments so it is harder for the students as new learners to do so each time they want to comment on something.

GRAPHIC BANNER

- Banner is also important as it gives the first impression of the reader from the students because if the banner looks boring without any graphic features, the students will automatically assume that the posts or the contents will also look dull as the banner.

:: F.O.O.T.N.O.T.E ::
-The way we teach reflects the way of our creative mind works and we will also produce creative students onwards. InsyaAllah. :)