Over
the past several decades, internet technologies such as e-mail and course
management systems have emerged as the common tools for enhancing the learning
process in most higher education disciplines. Educators and learners had the
collaboration and shared information that emerging technologies such as wikis,
social networks and the most popular is blog.
According to the dictionary, pedagogy means the activities of educating
or instructing that impart knowledge and skill together with arts and sciences.
This is means that pedagogy is the one of teaching method that combines the
logical and creative part of teaching.
Hence, blog is one of the best approaching of teaching method that can
be used by the educators. This is because, through the blog, people may
discover many things. For examples, we can share thoughts, concepts,
experiences and knowledge. Moreover, in blog we can read and analyze new
knowledge and skills. Below are the features and characteristics of making blog
that can improve the creativity and ideas of the students:
v BANNER
Banner is important for the blog. This is
because the presence of banner, it is like give the reader some introduction to
your blog. For banner, you just give some beautiful graphic or image that can
express what you blog is about and what is your blog theme. But, you may add
some words if you like but not too much because this is just for an
introduction to your blog only.
v
PICTURES
Every people have their own ideas and
creativity. By putting some pictures in your blog, it is like you create and
design some scene that can beautify your blog. Not just make your blog
attractive and interesting, but through attachment of photographs we can
express our feelings, experiences, concepts and any else. Here, you will give
the reader new knowledge and clear view about your post in your blog. We can
add photos to the blog post by clicking on the image icon in the post editor
toolbar then your pictures will then hosted in your free Picasa Web Albums
account.
v VIDEO
You also can put video in your blog. Video also
can give the reader clear view about certain topic just like the pictures, but
video is more interesting because it is like a moving picture that can catch
attraction of people to watch it. Besides that, video can give the reader
better understanding than pictures. This is because video is used to teach
people like a live and real situation. For example, to teach people about how
to make a curry chicken might be easy and clear if people were taught by
someone because it is like we can be guide. Adding a video to your post is very
easy, you just click on the fill strip icon on the post editor toolbar to get
started.
v AUDIO
Audio is also can put in the blog. However, we
cannot add it automatically because we need to embed it into html format. Here,
readers may get information about something via listening to sound, talk,
speaking and so much more. In addition, to make your blog more interesting, you
can put a music or other sources of entertainment to get attention of reader.
v
COMMENTS
In blog, readers can leave you responds to your
posts so that you can start to see who is interested in the same areas as you
or as an open conversation between you and readers. Might be they can give you
positive and negative feedback. If there is negative feedback, we can edit the
wrong one or weaknesses in your post. People can comments as much as they want
but blog is not like a Facebook or Twitter, because blog does not have any
notification and sometimes we could not realize the responds of the
reader.
v WIDGET
Widgets are small scripts or applets that can
be built into your blog, giving it extra functionality. You can add them to
your blog through the "Layout" tab. This will show you a mockup of
your blog's layout. In various sections, you'll have the option to "add a
gadget." "Gadget" is Google's term for its own in-house widgets.
They have plenty of very useful ones, including gadgets that will let readers
translate your blog into other languages, display recent posts from Twitter
feeds, show you the most popular posts, and create a slideshow of photos.
Besides, you can also add third party widgets. The "add a gadget"
dialog has an "Add your own" option, which allows you to input the
URL of any custom widget designed for use with Blogger. By adding some widgets,
it makes your blog nicer.
v LINKS
Every post and every category has its own
individual address, forever! This means that you can refer to them in articles,
emails, newsletters and so on in the knowledge that they will always be found.
Another great features for the Search Engines. Hence, people will get wider
knowledge and sometimes another blogger also can share the topic that you had
written.
v ON
GOING ASSESSMENT
By using this blog, you can gather information
from everyone in your faculty or institute, for instance, you can collect pre
and post conference views from the participants. If you are into research, you
can create a blog and collect information from the research participants or
experts. The best feature of blogs is archiving that allows storing information
for each month. Hence, readers can always revise and preview over and over
again. So, everyone will enjoy your works and what you had share will always
continuous and do not forgotten.
However, instead of it benefits, blog also have some weaknesses. For
example, no PHP support. Blogger comes with HTML and CSS but does not support
PHP which is well known as most developed computer language. With PHP we are
able to create great things which can give our blogs an enhanced and unique
looks. If blogger introduces PHP it would be great and can attract many
bloggers towards it who were using other platform. Besides that, in blog we are
unable to upload files other than photo and videos such as mp3, exe, rar, jar
and etc. If you want to upload them in blog, you have to upload it to some
other free upload server such as rapidshare.
As a conclusion, for me blog has many benefits and advantages. Blog can
be used as the one of the educational approaching towards the students in order
to get new knowledge and information. By using blog, the information is remain
exist and students can revise always, and of course it is not boring like
journal, text books and so on. Hopefully, this approach can be used widely in
Malaysia by the teachers and lecturers so that everyone can get benefits from
it. People say, a picture can express thousand of words. So, here I put an
image that can tell you how blog is very useful.
