Blog now become a wide-used Internet tool for people daily communication and we can make good use of this potential tool to make our English teaching and learning lively and interesting.
As for me, there are three ways I could use blogs in my own teaching.
1. Let the students open their own blog
I hope my students can learn the knowledge in an easiest and fun way. In this era, every student has his/her personality and they all have passion or aspiration to show their individuality. So blog is a very suitable way can reach their target. Let the students to open their own blogs, and combines it with the course may arouse their interesting.
We can get rid of e-mail and paper, but replace blogging. For example, students were always required to do a lot of paperwork or the reaction to a book or an article. If we let them post on the blog, the homework shows less boring and pressure. Not just teachers or TA to read your articles, but all of your classmates and the unknown audiences can read your thoughts and commends. It’s more like to share opinion with others than just hand in a task.
Let the students to open their own blogs has 3 positive reason:
a. Blog is like a promoter. With many people can read your blog, especially your classmates, what your write is easy to compare with others. So under audience's attention, students will do the works seriously.
b. Blog is like a chatting room. Students can leave message with each other and share individual standpoints.
c. Blog is like a mirror. There’re many functions to dispose your blog, such as upload photo and pictures, cope a link or make an audio or video. All these show your personalities.
(Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions and exchange opinions.)
(Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on variety of topics.)
2. Build online filing cabinet
Online filing cabinet is a convenient tool for me to organize my students’ homework and also offers students an efficient and easy way to communicate with teacher and other students. There are 3 advantages of using online filing cabinet：
A. Students just hand in their homework to the appointed online filing cabinet, and they never misplace the work. Through this way, teacher saves much time on checking E-mail and download homework from each student or open every student’s link address.
B. There are some great opportunities for student reflection through having all of their work organized in one place. After a period study, students can compare with the prior work and realize their progress. For it’s easy to search the former work, looking back teacher’s feedback and the opinion of other students also let the students see the growth they’ve accomplished.
C. Work on a weblog can be shared with others who might be interested or invested in the students’ progress.
3. Organized some activities
Teachers can make a vote or questionnaire through blog, and also can divided students into groups to make them to transfer some related information about courses. To organize some activities can make students work together and study in an active and harmonious phenomenon.
For more information, you can click here.
3 comments:
Hi! Li shen. This is Katie. I'm majoring in TESOL like you. I like your ways of teaching through blogs. Using a blog as a medium to give homework to students is a perfect opinion for both teachers and students. Since teachers don't need to spend more time to transfer and confirm the day's assignment to their students in the classroom, they invest time on focus on lectures effectively. In addition, students might shorten make mistakes to do their assignments. Thank you for sharing your opinions.
Your process of using blogs are quite good. I like your reasons and details. I want to apply your methods to my teaching.
You have given some very convincing arguments for having the students create their own blogs.
The link at the bottom is not very useful because it shows too many standards. How about just linking to the site that has the standards that you used.
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