Blogs as education tools – analysis

I already blogged on blogging a month or so ago under this post – To blog or not to blog...

Since then we’ve been asked to explore all three Group 2 Technologies - Online Spaces, i.e. blogs, wikis and websites, including creating the latter two (links to my first wiki, second wiki and my website here).  We are then supposed to focus on one of those three tools in the group.  Having spent considerable time SWOTting and reflecting on wikis, I don’t have a great deal of time to reflect my exploration of blogs, despite having spent even more time blogging and reflecting on my own learning experience.  However, after I reviewed my original post, I realised how little I have applied my own learning to the practical use of such a tool in a primary school environment.  Partly this is due to the fact that I’ve not been to primary school in 30 years (I have no children) and partly because at the beginning of this course I was doing my best to consider my own learning and that of my cohorts, having little further capacity to apply this understanding to my intended practice area.

In an effort to save time, I have combined this (I think necessary) further reflection with the exploration of one of the Group 4 Technologies – Digital Tools (fairly wide-ranging and open-ended), i.e. Online Concept Mapping.  More about Group 4 later.  Two sites, Bubbl.us and Text2Mindmap were suggested, both with their limitations.  Text2 was perhaps easier to insert and convert text, but was nowhere near as functional.  The greatest drawbacks are a) it's not possible to save their mindmaps for later amendment, only to save a picture of them and b) trying to save those pictures is hard as the mindmaps move around and the bubbles overlap :o( 

Bubbl.us has the same draw back in that the mindmap has to be saved as an image file, but at least the mindmap itself can be saved online for later amendment.  Bubbl.us has more functionality than Text2, is pretty straightforward, though not intuitive to navigate, but my main problem was I kept getting kicked out of the site (fortunately the site auto-saved my work).

If you click on the image below it will open larger, in a new window.  Unfortunately, it will also navigate you away from this blog (unless you Ctrl click, or right click and Open Link in New Window).  Y'all come back now, y'hear? :o)