The Teacher’s Tackle Box

This week we added to the experience of a blog by incorporating RSS Readers.  First, the blog still strikes me as something that I don’t see myself using outside of a classroom.  I see it as a great tool for communication amongst educators as well as students, but wouldn’t use it to display my own personal opinions or experiences. 

With the RSS Reader I was extremely confused at first, but after poking around I found it to be extremely useful.  I, like many others, get information from many different sites throughout the web by visiting them independently.  After learning that I could streamline this information into one easy to use page I was very pleased.  .

As for blogs and where they fit in the Cone, I believe there are aspects that tie them to several areas.  The act of creating a blog is clearly direct purposeful experience, as we all learned by doing.  Reading the blogs of fellow students can be seen as a demonstration as I learned how to subscribe to blogs thanks to a post.  Also, verbal symbols are incorporated into the language of blogs all over the internet. 

When it comes to RSS I am a little surprised at where I would categorize it, and that is somewhere with the recordings, radio and still pictures.  The reason I would place it in this category is because the information that is streamlined to the feed has been altered in one way or another.  It might lack a visual while incorporating audio or visa versa.  The information could be playing out in real-time, or the time and space might have been altered for effect.  At any rate, the information being presented to the feed has been picked out amongst the rest of the irrelevant information.

Blogs would be best utilized to give students a voice in addition to classroom discussion.  Students could “learn by doing” by setting up a blog as we did.  By viewing the opinions of other students and responding with their own input, they are able to challenge each other thus taking the learning experience further. 

RSS in a classroom setting would be extremely useful.  I can see myself utilizing this in a classroom by creating a page for each subject area.  I would set up feeds that gathered important related material from around the internet and put it into one place for my students to access.  This could be used for anything from research papers to further discovery on a topic that might have left a student with questions that weren’t covered in class. 

My take-away from the two articles is basically one big analogy.  I feel that Dale presented the cone as a tackle box of teaching bait that as educators we need to sift through.  It is our job to match the right medium with the right message in order for learning to take place.  As for Siegel, he is telling us that it isn’t just finding the perfect lure that matters, but making sure that we use it to its fullest potential instead of just throwing it in the water and waiting for a bite.