Chapter 7 Log

Communicating comprises a vast majority of what I do personally with most of the technology I use. I feel connected, and as such I have a hard time separating from my phone or laptop when I'm in class or at a meeting or with friends. This chapter covers a lot of the different things that I do with technology as a way of communicating.

The book first discusses discussion boards. I use several online forums - I even run one. I use them for my two biggest passions: sports and politics. The forum I run is a Florida Marlins discussion board. The beauty of using this forum is that it connects many people with similar passions but different ideas and provides a way for these ideas to be communicated. The book mentions that discussion boards are asynchronous; however, this is not always the case. On our forum we added a feature called "Live Topic." Live Topic automatically refreshes the thread you are reading whenever a new post is made, essentially making it synchronous, almost like a chat room. This comes in handy for our purpose when we are discussing the real-time events of a baseball game. I think that forums could be used for its strengths in education. Employing a forum in my classroom, for instance, would allow those people who are too shy to speak in class to share their thoughts. Additionally, it could allow those people who need time to gather their thoughts to formulate what they want to say, then type it and have the ability to edit it. It can also allow everyone to see everyone else's ideas, which in turn could trigger some new ideas in some students. Like the book mentions, online forums could be good for second-language learners, as it provides time to think about what will be said and doesn't require them to speak aloud.

I am always connected to AOL Instant Messenger, Google Chat, and Facebook Chat. For me, it makes communication much easier because I can double-check what I write and think it over before I say it. I use chat rooms less frequently, but do it as a matter of convenience when I need to talk to multiple people about the same subject. My most frequent use of chat rooms is for drafts in my fantasy sports leagues. As an educator, I could set up a chat room with chat hours once or twice a week. This would allow students who may be too shy or nervous to talk to me face to face a place where they could think about what they are going to say and not me embarrassed to ask anything.

As I said in class one week, I also have experience with internet radio and podcasts. I used to run an internet radio politics show with my best friend. The show would then be archived and turned into a podcast. I loved doing this, as it would connect me to people I'd never met who just found our show. Using student-generated podcasts in the classroom would be a lot of fun and extremely engaging. Students could be broken apart into groups in order to produce podcasts about certain topics in order to share them with the class. Making the podcasts available for everyone to download would provide an easy study tool for students. Creating the podcast would help those students who are shy in front of the class to participate, and because nothing would have to be "presented" in front of the class, creating a podcast would allow students to focus more on the facts and information as opposed to the delivery of the information.