Hello!
I'm Janet, a Canadian ESL instructor. This blog is designed to record my reflections throughout my coursework on the University of Oregon's E-Teacher Scholarship Program's "Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web". Please feel free to add your comments!
I first used blogs in my teaching a number of years ago when blogger.com was the hot new thing. The advantages of blogs were that they were a novelty, they encouraged writing fluency, and they helped students write to an audience other than the teacher. As noted in "Blogging for ELT" http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/articles/blogging-elt , blogs were also helpful in creating a sense of community among the users.
However, blogs were added on as an adjunct to the main coursework. I found reading and commenting on all the student blogs took much longer than I had anticipated. As time passed, the students, who were young adults, became more interested in posting links and photos than actually doing the writing assignments. Now of course we have Facebook and other social networking sites as well as blogs to help students network with others.
Hi Janet,
ReplyDeleteI'm happy to meet you online.
You said that this not your first blogging and you used blogs with your students. Would you mind if you talk about this experience in details? As you mentioned you used them to improve your students' writing fluency. What was your program? What approaches did you use to teach writing through blogs?
Yours,
Azhar
Hi Janet,
ReplyDeletenice to meet you online:-)
My experience is the same as yours regarding the time spent on grading students' online assignments. Sometimes I wished I never started it. But on the other hand, having seen what the majority of my students have achieved and how seriously and willingly they responded to the given tasks, I just know that I'll introduce blogging to my new class at the beginning of the new school year in September.
All the best
Arjana
Hello, Janet. I'm Johwyson, from Brazil. It's good to know your experience using blogs with your students. Our students here also love social network websites more than anything else. They use orkut mostly here. I've been trying to assign online tasks inside orkut. Sometimes it works out fine, sometimes not. What can we do? these students keep up more with technology than us. And "fun" seems to be keyword for them. LOL
ReplyDeleteGlad to meet you,
Johwyson.
Hi Janet,
ReplyDeleteI think today using blogs at classes work better with having many other social networks! The students already have their own social communities... and I think as Johwyson says "fun" is a keyword for students... I think using computers is fun for them! I think we have a serious problem with reading books since students today spend much time on their computers.
Khuloud.
Hi Janet,
ReplyDeleteNice to meet you.
It's great that you already have the experience of using blogs with your students. I agree, it's time-consuming, as is the whole on-line thing, including blogging. But we have to move in this direction.
We don't use blogging in teaching yet, but I'm sure, this course will help me a lot to do it with my students.
Best
Bella