'Best of the Education Blog' Awards
The 'Best of the Education Blog' awards are a showcase of the educational triumphs within the blogging community. Different blog sites are nominated by educators and enthusiasts alike and around 160 of these are chosen as the cream of the crop. From these 160, eSchool News narrows the field to a mere 32 which are then submitted to the official judging panel. From the 32, 4 winners are chosen to be the representatives of their respective categories.
To be chosen in this way, as a top blog site, gives a good representation of how blogging is progressing and also the common trends in blogs that are appealing to the masses. This will further help blogs evolve into a finely oiled educational tool that supports knowledge retention and gives students, teachers and parents an opportunity to participate in a child's growth as an individual.
The 'Best of the Education Blog' awards can serve as a template for other bloggers who are new to the game and can quickly catch them up to the top bloggers out there by providing them with the tools to preform the job effectively and easily.
Blogging: Advantages of Blogging as a Teaching Tool
This article talks about the use of blogs as a teaching tool. It shows some examples of integration of links and videos and gives some good solid advice and ideas about the use of blogging in a classroom community.
The article tells the reader about the benefits of using blogs, like being able to reflect on the information, research and comment at a time that is convenient to them outside of the classroom time. By doing so, the answers given by the students have to be concise, summarized, and structured, and the questions have to be more to the point. By having to type in a structured proper manor they students are actually working on their typing, writing, grammar and spelling skills. Also, the teacher will be able to post links and other media to the students to answer questions and expand on classroom topics.
Blogging also makes the students review the knowledge covered in class and helps them retain that knowledge and apply it to other circumstances. A teacher might even find it beneficial to get his or her students to follow a blog that another teacher, possibly in another class, school or country. This promotes peer to peer learning, which can be dangerous if not monitored, but when monitored it can be a useful teaching tool.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Concept Mapping
Concept Mapping
http://facstaff.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/handouts/concept.html
This article defines concept mapping as "a technique that allows you to understand the relationships between ideas by creating a visual map of the connections." This article also gives examples of what concept maps can be used for; (1) to see the connections between ideas you already have (which can be helpful in studying for a test); (2) to connect new ideas to knowledge that you already have (which can help you organize ideas as you find them in researching a paper; and (3) to organize ideas in a logical but not rigid structure that allows future information or viewpoints to be included (which can help you decide how you want to organize a paper). The integration of these ideas gives rise to practical use of concept maps in daily organization of thoughts and knowledge.
The creation of concept maps is then broken down into a 7 step process beginning with the research and recording of at least 15 different concepts or ideas, and then moving these ideas onto post it notes, next organization of the ideas from broadest to most concise, then place them together by relationship, next draw a line from an upper concept to the lower concepts they are related to (Broadest to most concise) and rearrange the pieces of paper, next you identify the relationship by naming the connecting lines with words or phrases and rearrange the pieces of paper, assign each concept an example, then copy the finished concept onto a single piece of paper. There you have it, a complete concept map in 7 easy steps.
http://facstaff.gpc.edu/~shale/humanities/composition/handouts/concept.html
This article defines concept mapping as "a technique that allows you to understand the relationships between ideas by creating a visual map of the connections." This article also gives examples of what concept maps can be used for; (1) to see the connections between ideas you already have (which can be helpful in studying for a test); (2) to connect new ideas to knowledge that you already have (which can help you organize ideas as you find them in researching a paper; and (3) to organize ideas in a logical but not rigid structure that allows future information or viewpoints to be included (which can help you decide how you want to organize a paper). The integration of these ideas gives rise to practical use of concept maps in daily organization of thoughts and knowledge.
The creation of concept maps is then broken down into a 7 step process beginning with the research and recording of at least 15 different concepts or ideas, and then moving these ideas onto post it notes, next organization of the ideas from broadest to most concise, then place them together by relationship, next draw a line from an upper concept to the lower concepts they are related to (Broadest to most concise) and rearrange the pieces of paper, next you identify the relationship by naming the connecting lines with words or phrases and rearrange the pieces of paper, assign each concept an example, then copy the finished concept onto a single piece of paper. There you have it, a complete concept map in 7 easy steps.
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