Self assessment on the creation of the blog

Learnings from experience:
I can admit that a blog is an effective form of ICT to be used with primary aged students. Students may independently, in pairs, groups, whole class create a blog and add snippets of information they feel they have learnt or is vital to their learning. Teacher direction/guidance and support would be required. A blog is a form of a multimodal text whereby it combines the use of image, text, and assumably, audio and video, however I have not yet come across the latter although undoubtedly I am sure this is possible, therefore in order to construct a blog, one’s multiliteracy skills will be utilised.

Difficulties:
First challenging task, determining a name for my blog… I don’t classify myself as very creative so I confronted my peers at uni and eventually I came up with furtureMrsX! After this, I struggled with posting information. I eventually discovered this out. My major challenge with posting, was photos. I know this wasn’t a requirement but it was a part of the blog-learning process for me. I posted the photos and somehow they cut themselves in half. Since then I figured out a way to stop this and that was to change where the photos would layout on the blog. I would still like to be able to minimise the size of the photos I have posted as they appear very large however I have no idea how to do this. I admit that I did cause myself stress as I kept forgetting where to go to post a new piece of information. I still struggle with this task, however, with some navigation of my own, I manage to get there in the end. The only link I am hoping to come across is one that might be titled: ‘How to change the order in which blogs are posted’. I am still looking though and have worked out that I could just delete it and add it in later as the newer posts seem to be the ones appearing first. Otherwise, apart from the obvious stated, I can’t recall any other difficulties encountered.

Simple tasks:
Setting up the actual blog was simple as the instructions are very basic (useful for a classroom). Selecting a layout and changing font colours became simplistic after investigating the site through navigation. My preferred learning style is rather practical, so I encountered little trouble toggling between links to discover new and exciting effects that can be placed on a blog. I did not find the adding in of my selected website a problem as I had already investigated with the blog by this stage. I consider myself relatively mediocre with ICT’s therefore, in my opinion, I am multiliterate!

Connection with theory:
I perceive a strong connection between this assessment task of creating a blog and the relevant theory that has been taught, to this point, in this unit. Jon Callow (lecturer) has focussed strongly on the differing forms of literacy evident in education nowadays and he stresses the importance of ensuring students are offered opportunities that allow them to deconstruct these literacies and gain an understanding/awareness of the differing forms of literacy and the purposes they serve.
The readings set for this unit make significant links with the content of the unit as a whole thus this assessment task. Many theorists focus on the increase in ICT’s in the classroom resulting in students needing to be multiliterate, that is, being able to interpret and respond to a range of literacies; multimodal texts. Therefore, this blog and the theory correlate as the blog covers a multitude of texts ranging from visual, audio and written.