Blog is so popular that has become part of our life, it has been broadly used for exchanging and updating personal information. For me, I usually use blogs to contract with my friends. But as an English teacher, I seldom think to real use the blog as a teaching tool, which is very challengeable, since the common way of teaching and learning to me is blackboard and classroom. After reading Will Richardson's book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, I found using blog is indeed a great way to improve teaching quality, I would like to try this tool in my future teaching.
1. Good platform for brainstorming and contributing ideas.
I will use the blog as a public place for my students to contribute their ideas and useful suggestions. For example, if there are a large amount of selections for choosing a topic or deciding an activity, which couldn’t be made within the class time, I will use blog as a wisdom pool to have students freely brainstorming and exchanging ideas and thoughts. They can contribute their thoughts and join this group work to discuss at any time at any place whenever they had one. Compared to teaching in the classroom, using blogs breaks the limitation of time and location, which is very convenient and high efficiency.
2. I will provide online resources, interesting reading materials and links to assist language learning.
There are lots of resources in the internet for language learning, and a good teacher cannot leave the help of internet. Like reading materials, videos, pictures, even songs or movies, as long as they are helpful for language learning. Whenever I find any useful and interesting information, I will share all my resources with students on the blog. On the other side, using blogs also benefits the teacher because I will encourage students to share their information with me. They can also write comments or give me suggestions on blogs to improve my teaching.
3. Distant teaching and learning.
Like this internet course LAI 684, I hope someday I have chance to try distant teaching of oral English, with my students living in other cities or even other countries. I will compile my own electronic book as my teaching material and post it on the blog. In the e-book, there will be series of units, and each lesson has a topic, such as sports, weather, country, etc.. I will communicate with my students from the image device, and blog plays a role as text book. That would be having great fun!
As a whole, using blog is brand new to me in real teaching, I think I will have more inspiration when I set my hands to do it. With the development of high tech, using internet tools in language teaching will be more and more universal and popular. Hope we teachers could gain and have fun with this high tech way of teaching.
1. Good platform for brainstorming and contributing ideas.
I will use the blog as a public place for my students to contribute their ideas and useful suggestions. For example, if there are a large amount of selections for choosing a topic or deciding an activity, which couldn’t be made within the class time, I will use blog as a wisdom pool to have students freely brainstorming and exchanging ideas and thoughts. They can contribute their thoughts and join this group work to discuss at any time at any place whenever they had one. Compared to teaching in the classroom, using blogs breaks the limitation of time and location, which is very convenient and high efficiency.
2. I will provide online resources, interesting reading materials and links to assist language learning.
There are lots of resources in the internet for language learning, and a good teacher cannot leave the help of internet. Like reading materials, videos, pictures, even songs or movies, as long as they are helpful for language learning. Whenever I find any useful and interesting information, I will share all my resources with students on the blog. On the other side, using blogs also benefits the teacher because I will encourage students to share their information with me. They can also write comments or give me suggestions on blogs to improve my teaching.
3. Distant teaching and learning.
Like this internet course LAI 684, I hope someday I have chance to try distant teaching of oral English, with my students living in other cities or even other countries. I will compile my own electronic book as my teaching material and post it on the blog. In the e-book, there will be series of units, and each lesson has a topic, such as sports, weather, country, etc.. I will communicate with my students from the image device, and blog plays a role as text book. That would be having great fun!
As a whole, using blog is brand new to me in real teaching, I think I will have more inspiration when I set my hands to do it. With the development of high tech, using internet tools in language teaching will be more and more universal and popular. Hope we teachers could gain and have fun with this high tech way of teaching.
4 comments:
Rong,
I see that you are becoming interested in distance learning. This type of learning is getting more and more popular. TESOL offers a series of online courses for preparing teachers to teach all the L2 language skills online. Although they are not free, you may want to take some or all of them at some point.
Dr. Burgos
I like your first and third thoughts. I think involving the students into choosing classroom activities is a great idea. Because most of the time, teacher will decide the direction how the class goes, but with the help of the students, we can involve more students to participate into the classroom activities, because that is what they want and like.
And you have the similar idea with me about distance teaching. It provides a platform for L2 learners in learning a foreign language. They usually speak their native language with their teachers, parents and friends. However, without practicing it, you can never learn it. The limitation before is that they really don't have the opportunity to do it. But now we have BLOGS. We can do it through the help of BLOG.
In this virtual community, the traditional roles of teacher and students become vague. They are all participants in the process of persuing better learning environment and larner learning opportunities for every individual students with diverse self-identities and personalities.
Perhaps, in the future, the title "teacher" may be changed to another friendly word.
Rong,
I agree that the blog is a fantastic space for students to give their own ideas and input about things you can't get to in class. I also think that it gives students an equal opportunity to share their ideas, because there are always those students who will overpower the class with their ideas and those who will not be able to contribute at all. Blogging is an equal-opportunity input device!
Julie
Post a Comment