Communication+and+Collaboration+Through+Blogging

COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION THROUGH BLOGGING

__Description of Product: __ A blog is a way to communicate or share information, ideas and opinions about something. Anyone can create a blog about any topic they would like to discuss. Blogging has become a popular way for people who share common interests or ideas to communicate and collaborate at any time. Since a blog is an online tool it can be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week providing you have a computer with an internet connection. Blogs can be as simple or as elaborate as the creator cares to make them. They may contain just an area for comments or can have additional tools included such as a calendar, RSS feeds, hyperlinks to related sites and much more. Blogging would be a great way for teachers, students and parents to communicate and share/access information. It can be quickly edited or updated and doesn't require alot of time or computer knowledge to maintain. __Process: __ Creating a blog with Blogger was actually pretty easy. The first thing I had to do was sign up on the website [|http://www.blogspot.com]. It does require you to have a Google-related e-mail account and since I already had a g-mail account, I chose to use that one. The site is provided by Google and allows for free blog space and simply required me to sign in and create a name for my blog. It was that simple to get started. Once I had that done I began to create my blog. I wanted it to be a place for students and their parents to go to communicate about our Virtual Classroom Experience. I included a place for us to post comments and information. I also included an interesting slide show of ocean animals, links to aquariums and webcams, a translator that will change the language of the entire blog, and an RSS feed of ocean exploration. I also included an archive section of all blog posts and a personal profile with a photograph. Blogger will allow you to add videos, urls and other media to the blog in order to enhance the blog. It was necessary to go into the settings and set it to all anyone so that the other students in class could access my blog. If I had not done that, I would have had to send an e-mail invitation to each one of them giving them access to my blog. With the current settings anyone can view or post to my blog. I have posted several comments and they were easy to create and also to view and/or edit. __Link to My Blog: __ [|Oceans 5 and 6 Blog] __Reflection:__ Creating the blog was quite easy. The Blogger program on blogspot.com was simple to use and pretty self explanatory. I did have some difficulty with the RSS feed but once I figured it out, the rest was fairly simple. As with some of the other projects, I tended to overthink this one and found myself very stressed before I even began. Once started however, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I had created something that I was satisfied with and that for the most part, met all of the criteria for the rubric. In the future, I will try to use a blog to communicate with parents. I think it would be an efficient use of time resources and would allow me to update information for my parents often as well as allow them to access it when it was convenient for them. One of the things I would have to be very careful of is limiting the content I include and not overwhelming my parents.

__Resources:__ Google. (2010). //Blogger//. Retrieved from []