Ornisa's Blog

This publishment is the last post of virtual museums in this blog. I would like to say good bye and thank you to every classmate who has shared their experiences and put comments in this blog. For this post, I found another useful blog which suggests how to create virtual museums from PowerPoint. The author is Dr. Christy Keeler, a pedagogy scholar from Clark County School District’s Teaching American History Grant. I found it is interesting because the blog contains samples of student-made and teacher-made virtual museums, tips to build the rooms and to put pictures (tips available in video), ready-made museum templates, as well as benefits of using virtual museums.

Teachers in any subject can assign the virtual museum project and I believe that students will definitely be engaged in the task when they get a chance to build their own virtual museums. This is another challenging way for students to present their knowledge!

Educational Virtual Museums Developed Using PowerPoint

My Reflection on Blogging

By doing this blog assignment, students teach each other. We take the role of both teachers and students. To post the information onto the blog, we have to search for appropriate information before making the decision of what we should present to friends. The students need to be very responsible to the audiences who will read the information and especially when it is online where anyone can read. During the process of searching for information, students gain more knowledge about the topic because we have to go through a lot of information about the selected tools. Also, students have to maintain a blog by answering questions or commenting on ideas posted by friends. These are the roles of teachers to facilitate learning. As students, we read the post and comment on the information on others’ blogs. To make a meaningful comment, we have to understand the post. Subsequently, we know more about various tools from other people’s blogs and get some ideas to apply in education. From this task, most information posted by friends is updated. I am not a person who keeps abreast of technology so the information has made my world wider.

The blog assignment is a good activity for the class. Every student is required to take part. However, it is necessary that everyone participates actively in the activity – posting every week as required, commenting on the information and maintaining the blog. There is a sense of teamwork underlying this task even though it is individual work. If it happens that many students do not cooperate, the activity cannot move forward. Discipline is a big word for this way of learning. I think if this blogging is used with children, teachers will have to intervene quite a lot by helping to either pose or answer the questions. This is to make clearer views of knowledge because younger students may not be able to explain it well to their friends.

Surfing through existing weblogs, I found that many educators share their experience about teaching in their blogs. Weblogs are generous places where people exchange personal experience causing sharing in an educational online community. The visitors can also interact with the authors by using the comment features. If we want more information, we have a means to contact with the author. Educators learn from other teachers’ experience from any place in the world. Even though some information is personal, as educators I believe that we can analyze and adapt whatever is appropriate to suit our situations. Blogs then are good resources for teachers as they can help teachers generate some ideas to make their classroom more effective.

In this assignment I have presented 2 technological tools: Flickr and Virtual Museum. I studied many projects about Flickr and virtual museum related to classroom activities but I haven’t tried them myself. If I have a chance in the future I will try to make use of these tools in the classroom or in training. However, what I have already done is that I have sent a sample of a virtual museum created by a student to the teachers in my school along with the useful sites for virtual museum creation. I hope that the project will be a suitable replacement for some traditional assessments like a paper report or an ordinary PowerPoint presentation.