Blogs for teaching

I am using this blog as a sort of personal teaching journal, with a view to my experiences being a useful source of information for other teachers. I plan to use it for one semester, August to December 2010, which will alllow me to develop a good rhythm have a framework in which to operate. I am going to use blogs in two of my clases and this blog will be a reflexion on how it works/ doesn´t work.

Blogs are useful for teaching as they can promote the use of particular abilities, like wrting in the language classroom as well as team work and auto-reflexion. This auto-reflexion is useful for the student and the teacher. The student can see his or her progress (or lack of it) and so has a record of how they are working (or not!). This is useful because the student is able to see where his or her strengths and weakness lie and so make performance related decisions. The teacher can also reflect on his or her practice, aiming to better the delivery of the materials. As Helen Barrett says, the reflexion is the most important part.

Different kinds of entry can be used, such as written entries or photographs to show the development of a project. Students can provide links to other blogs or websites which are relevant to their content. Videos, music, news reports or any other content which is interesting and stimulating can be used.

I want to use blogs in the classes to promote writing. I find that it is difficult to motivate students to write in English so this might be a good way of provoking interest. For the lower level group, it will be a class blog where students work in pairs to produce an entry about the topic we are viewing. The other students will make comments. In the higher level group, I am going to divide the class in to groups and they will each have a blog to run throughout the semsester to show how their project is developing and collect the experiences of the participants. Again the other students will have to comment. The idea is that the students have the opportunity to write but also that they see their progress, in that way the blog works rather like an online portfolio.

An aspiration for the project is that the public nature of the blogs encourages an overall better quality of ideas fro mthe students. One of the main problems with academic writing is that the students rarely see the point if the only reader will be their teacher. if their productions are in the public arena, this may stimulate them to pay closer attention to what they are writing. As Lohnes (2003) writes, the use of blogs provides an amazing opportunity to participate in the internet comunity.

It will be important to maintain a certain level of control over the blogs, therefore I will be editor in all the blogs. As the blog will be given a mark at the end of term, I hop this will function as motivation to produce high quality academic work. Overall I see blogs as a useful teaching aid which can help students see their work in a wider context than their immediate academic surroundings. I think they are a fun and interesting way of combining the techonological interests of the students with academic writing.

I shall be back with updates on the planning stages.

Watch this space!

Referencia
Stefani, L., Mason R. y Pegler, Ch. (2007). The educational potential of e-portfolios. New York: Routledge.

Preparation

The summer is when I take stock and try to re-jig my courses for next term. I am in the delightful process of reviewing book catalogues, which doesn´t feel a lot like work. The catalogues are glossy and thick with images. The books themselves are a feast for the eyes. I wonder if this helps. Surely we want to be ecouraging students to find wonder in the words and use their own imagination, not be distracted by a plethora of pictures. What we want least of all is that they will only read books which have been gloriously illustrated. It is the hardest task, I find, to get students to read. I didn´t have that problem when I worked in Europe, but here the average number of books read a year is one. So, perhaps if the pictures work, they are worth it afterall.

This video is one of a series about ESL reading in the classroon. Enjoy!

Beginnings

The intention of this blog is to reflect on my teaching practice. I want my insights to be useful for others.
I will be looking at investigaction-action techniques and talking about my classroom experiences. This site will be for me to share my thoughts with others so that we can all benefit. We can look beyond our normal scope to new horizons.

Please stop by and share your thoughts.