Bon Jovi - Livin' On A Prayer

Bon Jovi is the most amazing hair band ever!

Music Video Assignment

Blogger is a great tool for having students share their work. The iPad Blogger App is slightly limited in that students can only add text, and images, and labels. The web version of Blogger allows us to do a few more things, such as:

• add videos to a post
• create links within a post
• add and edit HTML code
• create bulleted and numbered lists

For this assignment, you need to create a video post using the web version of blogger on your favorite music artist. The post must include the following:

1. an embedded music video from YouTube
2. a paragraph describing why you connect with this particular artist
3. a link within your paragraph to the artists website or an article or website about the artist (Wikipedia)
4. a label with the title of the assignment (Music Video Assignment)
5. a label with your first name and last initial (Justin J.)

iPad Lesson Plan Journal

You have essentially been spammed with an overload of information on how to use the iPad in the classroom this week. While we intended to blitz you with these tips, tools, techniques, and technologies, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed at this point. The balance of our time together is going to be spent narrowing in on one of the things that you learned this week, particularly something that you think that you will implement right away this fall.

For this assignment, you will create a blog post from your iPad Blogger App detailing how you plan to implement one of the tools that you have learned in this training. Your post must include the following:

1. an appropriate title that includes the name of the tool you will use
2. a picture that represents what you would like to do and is created on your iPad
3. at least a one paragraph narrative outlining how you will use this tool
4. a label that is the name of the assignment (iPad Lesson Plan Journal)
5. a label that is your first name and last initial (Justin J.)

Blogging in the Classroom

The term "blog" is derived from the contraction of the words web log. Blogs are discussion or informational websites that contain individual posts created by one or multiple authors. Blogs typically focus on a niche topic and are geared toward a particular audience. Blogs are interactive in that readers can write comments to individual posts, and blog authors can, in turn, reply to those comments. A typical blog combines text, images, links to other blogs and websites, and other media related to its topic. One of the distinct advantages of blogging is that it lowers the entry barrier to web publishing for non-technical people. Blog authors need to know little to no web coding, such as HTML, to maintain professional looking and content rich websites.

The following is a list of common uses for blogs:

• provide commentary on a particular subject
• personal online diaries
• online brand advertising of a particular individual or company
• art blogs
• photo blogs
• video blogs 
• music blogs
• podcasts
• microblogging (i.e. Twitter)
• instructional resources for education, which are often known as edublogs.

Let's focus in on the last bullet point - using blogs in education. There are countless ways that a teacher could effectively and quickly use blogs to augment or enhance their teaching. Blogs are really useful tools for sharing resources and information in the classroom, and web publishing tools such as Blogger and Wordpress allow you to manage your blog and its content with easy to use interface tools that take care of the web coding for you. They can be used as a makeshift Learning Management System (LMS) if your school does not subscribe to a service such as Schoology, Whipple Hill, or Moodle. Maybe the most important uses of blogs in the classroom are giving students the ability to share their own work, particularly writing, and teaching them how to appropriately reflect on others work and interact with people in an online setting.

The following is a list of common uses for educational blogs, but it is by no means a comprehensive or complete list:

• learning journal
• parent contact/resources
• posting and collecting homework assignments
• showcasing student work
• message board for responsive conversations
• classroom resources
• learning management system (LMS)
• class website
• digital portfolios