YOU HAVE CREATED A CLASS BLOG… HOW CAN YOU MAKE YOUR BLOG AN EFFECTIVE LEARNING TOOL?

This is the most challenging part of blogging with students and it is closely related to maintaining interest. If your students are interested in the content of the blog, it means that they visit the blog regularly, follow teacher’s entries and leave comments.

Here are some ideas for making your class blog an effective learning tool:

o Start class discussions on the blog and expect students to contribute with their comments.
o Connect your students to the world by building international connections. Read this post for an example.
o Make learning grammar fun with videos, songs, etc. Click here for an example.
o Post reading passages and ask students to comment on them.
o Give useful links. (e.g. fun links, online exercises, online research links for performance tasks, projects.)
o Give links to other class blogs.
o Post some fun stuff. (e.g. Music videos, short films, songs, etc.) Click here for an example.
o Put different widgets on the sidebars. (e.g. Clock, Calendar, Feedjit, This Month in History, etc.) See an example of an entry about widgets.
o Post brain teasers and reward the students who give the correct answer. (e.g. First five students get chocolate.) Click here for an example.
o Post interesting facts and fun trivia, and ask students to comment on these facts.
o Upload worksheets and assignments.
o Create class pages (it works very well if you have more than one class) and let students leave comments freely in this area.
o Create quizzes and post the quizzes to the blog. Click here for an example.
o Post motivational messages.
o Put class photos.
o Create polls and publish different polls regularly.
o Give story starters and ask students to write their own stories. Here is an example…
o Let them use English to communicate with you and each other… Let this happen naturally:-)
o Share learning ideas with parents. Click here for an example.

MODERATING STUDENT COMMENTS & MISTAKE CORRECTION…
o Before your students start writing comments and replying to your messages, teach your students the etiquette of online posting and set some blogging rules. Here are some good links for you to get ideas:

BPL Netiquette For Kids
KABOOSE – Safe Surfing
Woodlands Junior School – Codes on the Internet
The Core Rules of Netiquette
Bud’s Blogging Experiment – Blogging Rules
Ms. Hughes’ Blog Agreement

o It would be a good idea to go over the punctuation rules. Although students are writing for the blog, they shouldn’t think that punctuation rules are not important. I prefer not to approve comments that are written carelessly, with lots of punctuation mistakes.
o Mistake correction is a somewhat complicated issue. Some teachers may prefer not to correct their students’ mistakes. I think it depends on the age and language level of the students. I prefer to correct major mistakes and also I can’t stop myself correcting spelling mistakes. I ask my students to view their comments after my approval and check if there are any changes. Although it is not very common, a few bright students copy their comments before they post; and after their comment is moderated, they compare the two comments to see if there are any differences. Another technique that I sometimes try is that I gather some student comments (without giving student names) on a worksheet and ask students to spot the mistakes in the class. Although this technique works very well, it is the most time consuming.

We come to the end of the series:-) I would love to share ideas with bloggers and blogger wannabes! If you decide to create a class blog after you read this series of articles, please send me the URL of your blog so that I can learn from your experiences as well!

“Motivation will almost always beat mere talent.”

ELT BLOGOSPHERE WELCOMES YOU:-))

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.