You may have noticed that I have added a number of gadgets to my reflective blog. I wanted to explain the reasons for them, because none of them are there by accident - they are all designed to allow fellow members of my course to enjoy my blog in an interactive way and facilitate the possibility to use it to aid your own reflection experiences.
Firstly, we have the fish. If you haven't figured it out yet, they are interactive - you can play with them! Go on, try it now. Try dragging the mouse around the 'tank'. As we should all know, there are many different types of learners and I felt that amongst all this writing, it was important to cater for the visual amongst you. If you are a visual learner, you prefer images, pictures, colors and maps to organise information and communicate with others (Shires, 2008). You can easily visualize objects, plans and outcomes in your mind's eye. For teaching practice, the interactive whiteboard will be your best friend and you love drawing, scribbling and doodling, especially with colors. So the fish are for you. A little bit of visual stimulation to get your blood pumping.
The next gadget on the blog is a 'Share it' box. I appreciate that some of you may not wish to run a blog yourself, but may still wish to engage in the resultant discussions from any posts. This box will allow you to share the post to your favourite social networking site and have your own discussion over there. Feel free to invite me along too!
Below this is a search bar. I can imagine that after a year, I am going to have posted a fair number of entries. This will allow you to zero in on exactly what issue you wish to read about. So if you want to revisit a previous post, type it in in here and the gadget will do the rest... =)
For the same reasons listed above - ie. you may not have a blogger account of your own, you may wish to follow the blog via email instead. If that is the case, the subscribe by email box is for you!
Finally, the last and possibly the best gadget is the Amazon search box. From time to time, I am going to discuss books. It may be reference books that I have used within my work, it may be a book that I have found to be particularly inspiring or it may well be a childrens' book that I think will make a fantastic resource in my classroom next year - if you want to check it out yourself, you can search Amazon directly from my blog and find copies (new and used) for yourself. I hope that this resource proves extremely useful over the next nine months.
Well, that is all of them for now, but if I do add any more at a later date, I will be sure to let you know what they are, what they are for and my motivation for adding them.
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