Google Analytics

After reading DSWaters' Blog 'Advice On Being A More Effective Blogger' I decided to install Google analytics. For a more detailed description of what it is and does, check out her blog. But basically it gives you stats on how many people are visiting your blog, how they found you and how far they went into your blog. Cool stuff. I'm just hoping that I'm not the only one who's checking out my blog!

Boosting Collaboration

I have been participating in the knowWeeks course for 4 days now, and I cannot believe the amount of collaboration that's going on--all through blogs! My big task now, is to come up with a way of using blogging with my students.

Using Blogs in Education

In an effort to get a better handle on blogging and how I might use blogs as a teacher, I'm taking a knowWeeks course called 'Using Blogs in Education'. My goal is to see how I could use blogs in a distributed learning (DL) environment for high school science and math courses. I could see blogs helping my students in many ways:
1. By replying to each other's posts they would be getting the peer to peer interaction that can be difficult to achieve in a DL environment.
2. It would give them a place to work on a deeper understanding of the topics they are learning about by giving them a forum to work out their ideas.
3. It would help them to work on their metacognition (is that the right term?) -- thinking about how they think.

I'll be interested to see the blogs of the other participants in this course to see what their ideas are.