Educational Blogs

Having read several blog entries on How To Use Micro-/Blogging (like Kerry Turner’s and Laura Walker’s), I started looking for blogs that actually make use of these theoretical approaches. Turns out theory is very different from real life: I hardly found anything worthwhile, so this post is, again, mostly about theories on Web 2.0 apps as learning tools.

Nevertheless, there were some blogs I found which seemed to be somewhat successful approaches to using technology in non-IT subjects:

• Grundkurs Deutsch (http://gk-deutsch.blogspot.com/).

The owner of Grundkurs Deutsch is Peter Ringeisen, teacher in Bavaria, who has set up this blog in 2004 and has been using it with several courses. The layout is quite plain, and it is a mixture of student-generated content and recommendations posted by the teacher (aka rip). The student-generated content is often just written homework, so not really very Web 2.0-y, but sometimes they create videos or share recommendations about books etc. The teacher posts new tasks or interesting projects from other schools. He’s doing the same for his Leistungskurs Englisch (http://djd-elks.blogspot.com/), and the students there seem to get even more into the community aspect of using a blog for their course.

All in all, these blogs certainly aren’t perfect, but students make frequent use of them, so it obviously works and is at least a step in the direction of using EdTech in school.

Twitter Handbook for Teachers

I found a neat little handbook for teachers on how to use Twitter, or actually on how best to get started with it. If you have already created your account, just skip the first few pages, but there’s still some useful information in there, including further links on the topic, which I will check out in a bit, and a Wiki for teachers on Twitter, where you may be able to find interesting people to follow.

Second look on Twitter

Having spent some time on Twitter looking for interesting people to follow – and by interesting I do not mean my friends, whose lives obviously are interesting to me but not exactly a reason to use Twitter, as I still prefer all the other, more direct forms of staying in touch to simply reading status updates – I am surprised to have actually found some folks who have posted very interesting links and who I am now going to follow, at least for a while.

druHH

So here’s my new blog, and despite having seen this video I have also registered a Twitter account under the same name – the things you do for uni ;o)