Saturday, May 17, 2008

Blogs and wikis workshop

I'm with a group of teachers, figuring out how to use blogs to support English language teaching in schools. If there is anyone out there that wants to contribute, please feel free to add to the comments section below.

I've collected some links to some class blogs and I would like to discuss those with you. Before you have a look at the links, it might be a good idea to think about what blogging actually is.

When you look at the links you will probably notice that there are different things you can do with a class blog:
  1. Post administrative information
  2. Post learning tips for your students
  3. Have students share work with a real audience
  4. Facilitate collaborative project learning
  5. And much much more...
Another important point to bear in mind is that blogging is supposed to be motivational for students. Looking at these blogs, how have the teachers made the learning experience motivational for students?

Blogging is also extremely flexible. Looking at these blogs, what range of learning opportunities do you see for students?

Here are the links:
Sister project showcase
Room 9 Nelson central’s blog
Mr. C’s class blog
English 131 blog
CALL Lessons 2005-2007
Which of these blogs do you like the best? What do you think might work for you? Let me know what you think.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks again Christoph for your inspiration!
A quick question - you said you 'subcribeb" to my site -how to do that? Can I have all my students subcribe?
Thx,
Neil

Christoph said...

Hi Neil,

Click on the RSS feed link at the bottom of your blog - you can either subscribe to posts, or comments, or both. You will need to set up a RSS reader for this (like Bloglines or Google reader - you have to create an account. See this post and this animation). Also, this may not work with IE 6, which is not RSS compatible, so you would need IE 7 or Firefox.

Your students can subscribe as long as they have some kind of RSS reader as well.

Dave DeBaker said...

Thanks for linking to my blog (English 131 blog). If anyone has any questions about it, I'd be happy to answer them.

Wm Chamberlain said...

Thanks for the link to my blog.
Mr. C