Plan for introduction to PDP using blogs for history students

Later today Kay and I will be doing a presentation to all of the History Department 1st year undergrads. We will explain to them PDP, convince them that it is essential, and show them how blogs can help them with it. The plan for my half of the session, specifically about blogs, is below…

What is a blog (show blog and demo features)?

• a sophisticated online notebook or journal;
• belongs to a single person, the blog owner;
• the owner chooses the title and design of the blog;
• the owner creates categories into which they can organise their entries.
• the owner writes entries in the blog;
• the owner decides on who can read and comment on each entry;
• every blog has a url that starts with http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/ and includes the name of the owner.
• a blog directory for finding people's blogs (see blog homepage).

Get them to write down my url, then comment on this entry.

How does using a blog help with skills, PDP and academic work?

Your PDP category:

You can use your PDP categeory to:

• write about how you have used, developed, and are improving your communication, IT, problem solving, study and research skills;
• record and share your plans;
• write about how you are organising your time;
• reflect upon your learning and your successes.

You can easily share these entries with your fellow students, your tutor, or the whole world. You can also restrcict access to yourself. Demonstrate writing an entry.

Academic and other categories:

You may be asked to create a category that is linked to a module. You may want to create other course related categories. You can use these to record and reflect on:

• meetings, lectures, seminars, tutorials;
• your responses to questions and ideas asked by your lecturers;
• your ideas, work and writing;
• books and other resources that you are using (book reviews);
• definitions of key terms.

Your blog is an ideal place to try out ideas and to see what other people think.

A good thing to do is to record your academic work in these categories, and then reflect upon the PDP aspects of them in your PDP category. You can use the write follow up option to write a related entry (demo this by writing a follow up entry).

Soon you will also recieve emails that suggest things for you to write about. These are optional, but hopefully will be useful. We call them prompts.

More things that you can do with blogs:

• you can very easily write book, CD and DVD (movie) reviews;
• you can find people's blogs in the blog directory;
• it includes an "About Me" page that you can use as your homepage;
• you can upload images into galleries and use them in your entries;
• select key entries from your blog to add to your CV;
• more coming soon!

Get a blog at http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk

Sign in, then register.

Robert O'Toole : 09 Nov 2004 11:51 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem