Technologica

I’m pretty new to the world of blogs, but I’ve found blogging attractive for both pedagogical uses and also personal ones. Today I’ll be talking about using blogs in what my school calls (pardon the pun) C.A.L.L. class for ESL learners. I’m the CALL coordinator at a junior high school in Taiwan. The program serves about 500 students. The objective of the program is to let students learn and practice their English in a computer lab. A secondary objective is to allow students to become exposed to the world of computer technology (using English as a corollary).

When I took over as coordinator, students in the program were taught how to set up a blog and basically use it as a kind of journal. I was reluctant at first to just let my students go for it, without at first giving them some guidance about what to blog about. I found the previous classes’ blogs to be lacking something. Each student wrote and posted, but there was little substance to it.

Before I could reasonably ask my students to blog, I felt it necessary to build one of my own. I’m now working on several personal ones and a few teaching ones as well. I’ve got to say that I really like the way they’ve been working for me. Basically, I post my lessons on my ‘teacher blog’. When students come into class and log on, they always go to my blog to read their ‘daily assignment’. That saves me time in explaining things to a class of students who have their monitors in front of them (distraction!). It also allows the students to go back to read instructions again as many times as they need. Additionally, it also serves as a record of my lessons, for future reference in coming academic years.

For my students, I set up a single blog for ALL my grade 8 classes. That way, students can all participate on one blog, and see and comment on each other’s posts. It’s been working really well and they seem to like to see each other’s work. Not only do students learn about embedding images, slideshows, flash objects and videos, they get to practice their writing and reading skills, which is just what ESL students need. I can also comment on the posts, advising them on how to improve their grammar and punctuation. They also learn all the keyboarding and navigation skills we use in the English cyber-world.

I continue to learn and experiment with blogs. I especially encourage ESL teachers who have access to language or computer labs to start blogging.

This post has been written on “tips for using blogs with students” or “advice for using class blogs” as part of:The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition!

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