Project #3 C4T

C4T Assignment

C4T #1 comment 1

For my first C4T assignment, I was assigned to Ms. Edna Sackson's blog entitled What Ed Said. Ms. Sackson is the teaching and learning coordinator for a school in Melbourne, Australia. The first two post on Ms. Sackson's blog were guest posts, so I started with the most recent post written by the author herself. This post was titled, "Time to learn..." and focused on a recent "Staff Conference Day". This was a type of professional development lead by teachers for the teachers and was divided into different groups that the teachers could either decide to participate in or to facilitate. Ms. Sackson provided quotes, some of which were from facilitators and some that were from participating teachers, all of which coincided with their group. By reading the teachers' comments, it was clear that everyone enjoyed a professional development day that was interactive and one where they could decide which group would be most beneficial to them.

I left my first comment under this post made my Ms. Sackson. I introduced myself and informed her that I was in a class at USA and that I was assigned, for a short time, to view her blog and comment on a couple of her posts. In my comment I also said that I enjoyed reading the quote from a woman named Linda who facilitated in the group that was learning more about blogging and its benefits in a classroom setting. I informed Ms. Sackson of the sole purpose of EDM 310 and that we were also exploring the world of blogging and how it can be incorporated in the classroom.

C4T #1 comment 2

For my second comment on What Ed Said, I was able to read a post titled, "Twitter in the classroom..." and it focused on a class, the first class in the school, who had started using Twitter. The teacher had ultimate control of the classroom Twitter account, which I liked, but the students could tweet about their learning experiences or they could collect data from their followers. Ms. Sackson began by showing the class how Twitter works and created a sample tweet. She said that shortly after, the children were learning and eager to tweet. She said that, when you use Twitter in your classroom, not only do children learn technology, but they learn other skills such as expressing themselves to an actual audience and reflection of their learnings.

In my comment, I expressed to Ms. Sackson that, at first, I was slightly skeptical of what Twitter could offer for children. I was worried that their little wondering eyes would drift off into something not pertaining to classwork, or that they would just see Twitter as something fun and not a learning experience. However, like I told Ms. Sackson in my comment, I loved that the classroom teacher had ultimate control of the account and that students could post throughout the day about what they learned with teacher supervision.