Relect on the use of Blogs and Wikis

In the latest issue of Reflect, Liz Boyden suggests some ways of using Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom. She covers blogs and wikis so if you haven’t used any of these tools yourself, want to know more or want some ideas of how they might be used by learners, then this is a good article to read.

I particularly like how Liz uses Tumblr, a blog that enables learners to put short multimedia posts on their own webspace, including photos, text, video clips and sound files. For work based learning, this could be particularly useful for also hosting the kinds of electronic information that currently goes into an e-portfolio.

Liz notes:

“….Tumblr was the most successful blog application used in the project. It has a visually attractive layout and potential for learners to create a professional-looking webspace … Learners could post photos from Google images and then make a text post explaining the image. A particularly successful use of Tumblr was as a daily online diary when learners were on work experience.”

As well as reading the article, you can also watch a short video on Liz’s own blog to hear more about their learners using their new Tumblogs.

In the article, Liz also gives some good hints and tips for using blogs and wikis, much of which also links in nicely with the advice JISC Legal gave last month regarding legal implications of using web 2.0 tools.

There’s clearly some good work going on at the Project Experimental Teaching (PET) project and I look forward to reading more about how it develops!