Class blogs and class websites

Blogs are very flexible platforms that can be used in a range of ways to support learning in general, and language learning in particular. Take a look at these blogs to get some idea of their potential (not all of these are currently active):

• http://blogs.bhs.cc/j2blogs/
• http://room9nelsoncentral.blogspot.com/
• http://en2251.edublogs.org

You might also like to check out the discussion of class blogs on Tom Barret's blog, or on Twitter (#classblogs).

As Ducate and Lomicka point out (articles here and here, but require library sign-in), reading blogs can be an important first step towards writing blogs. If you want to take their advice and spend some time locating appropriate blogs, then you (or your students) could make use of Google blog search or Technorati.

As we'll see, personalizing a blog can be a lot of fun, but you need to be wary of privacy concerns, and some people are reluctant to post a profile image to a public website. One obvious solution is to ask students to post a picture which has some personal significance for them, like a favourite place or animal. Another solution (which can be quite fun) is to have students create an avatar, using a tool like this one. You might also need some photo-cropping tool like Photoshop, or an online tool like this one.

When it comes to designing a class website, one possible platform is Google sites. Before you leap in, it's a good idea to think about the affordances that Google sites offers, and how you might use a class website to support language learning outcomes. You can get an initial idea by taking a look at a couple of Google sites templates for teachers, here and here, and reflecting on whether this kind of content would be useful in your context. The next step is to come up with a design that is tailored to your particular teaching and learning context.