CEdO520 What is the Value of Blogging?

During our first class Jim asked if we liked doing the weekly blogs.  Quickly I responded with a "no".  Then he gave us the assignment to come up with ways to use blogging. 

Personally I don't mind blogging, but I find the weekly assignment repetitive and tedious.  I find it very difficult to answer the same question “How can you apply what you’ve learned” every week, when many times we are working on similar types of material from one week to the next.  Unfortunately not everything that we do can be used in my classroom or school at this time, or at that moment I haven’t had enough experience with the tool to be able to really answer that question yet.  It doesn’t mean that I didn’t find the experience beneficial though.  The other part is reading and providing thought provoking questions to our classmates.  This is difficult for me to do when I’m just learning it myself. 

Since I understand that at the end of this graduate program I will have to create a capstone, I think my blog will prove to be invaluable.  I think of blogging as a “journal”.  With that being said, I think it is important to do an overview of what I learned and my experience with it.  I would like to blog more about what did I learn, how well did it work, can I use it in my teaching environment, why or why not, and what issues or challenges did I have if any.  When I look back a year from now, I believe this type of information might be more valuable to me.  With this being said, I don’t know what our capstone has to be about or like.  Perhaps that type of weekly blogging wouldn’t be as beneficial.

In regards to reading and responding to my classmates’ blogs, I do think there’s value in it.  I like reading each other’s blogs because it provides other peoples insights.  Some things I’ve learned by reading the other blogs is that person’s experience.  Did they have difficulty with it or were they able to easily manipulate the program?  From their blog, I’ve also read about ways that they might be able to use the material in their professional life and how they would use it.  Instead of trying to come up with questions on material I’m just learning, I’d like to write about something I learned or was able to take away from their blog.