Reflection/Suggestion

During this class I learned about many useful emerging technologies that can be utilized in the classroom. The discussions, projects, and presentations were all very beneficial. I enjoyed being able to share links and ideas using our blogs. I think this is a valuable asset to any classroom. I look forward to implementing this technology in my future classroom.

I have a suggestion to anyone who feels like they will be using blogs in their classes. I feel like livejournal.com is very user-friendly and easy to learn. I think this site would be good to use and perhaps even more beneficial to a class than blogger. Using this site instead of blogger, allows you to have a "friend" page, which means you subscribe to other people's blogs and it shows it all to you on one page. Anytime you comment on someones posts, they receive an email and they can comment back to you in a chain. You are able to see the thread of comments in the order they occurred. You receive an e-mail for each comment and are alerted when you receive one. Basically you can reply to another person's comment, which creates a conversation in a way. There are also things called communities on livejournal. Communities are basically areas for people with similar interests to post blog entries about a certain topic. You can ask each other questions and help each other out. This can be useful in a classroom when talking about certain subjects. You can also make the blogs private so only the students in your class can view them and post comments. This is just something to keep in mind when using blogs in the classroom.
This is what a thread of comments looks like in livejournal. You can see the chain of events, who commented first, then someone commented on their comment and so on. Every user gets a little icon as well to identify themselves.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their summer vacations and good luck in your next school year!