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Kate M, one of the brilliant English as a second language (ESL) teachers at PRACE is thinking about using a blog to connect with her students. We talked about a few different ways to approach the idea:
(NB: You can find these ideas also in a larger document over here at google docs.)
- Start with a single blog in broadcast mode. Put the teaching and learning activities up and send students to read or listen there. Dale Pobega’s ESL Club is a great example of this.
- Embed a video into one post, with an activity where students post a reply via the comment form – Kate’s doing recipes and cooking in the class, so she thought it would be good to embed video from one of the SBS cooking shows.
- When you start, you can make commenting open to any anonymous visitors, to save students from having to log in.
- (Later on, you could get them to sign in to comment.)
- As you get more confident, you could add a form under the video where students answer questions and you get the feedback automatically (eg using google forms).
- Further down the track, you might get students to work in small groups to make their own post, with a review or a narrative.
- Or you could post audio recordings from presentations or interviews in class.
- If the students really take to it, they could set up individual or small group blogs of their own later on. (Yes that is a Big IF.)
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So the upshot is that i’ve started making another visual guide, a how-to document introducing you to “the new” blogger-dot-com. You’ll only find the most basic of instructions in this first draft, ie how to make a new post:
What else needs to go in the second draft of the document? Other skills might include how to:
- adjust the layout, adding various gadgets or changing the theme
- embed video into a post
- add images to your post (for example if you have creative commons licensed images from flickr)
What skills would you like to see added to the document?