Tuesday, September 7, 2010

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):
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.

5 comments:

hotrice said...

Hey, Christoph, it's Calvin here. How are you? A you teaching this course in the first semester this year?

Christoph said...

Hi Calvin,

Thanks for the comment. The course is actually scheduled to run in both semesters this year. Perhaps it's more popular than I thought! Feel free to follow along, we are doing one or two things a bit differently this semester...

hotrice said...

Wow, a two-term course? Nice. Guess you got some nice projects lined up for the rookies.

Gibble said...

I somehow managed to do the computer courses run by CSC at CityU. These were invaluable for a decidedly non geek like me. I just wish I had known about them before I did the MATESL course, and the court case for that matter !
I would thus urge you to give a plug for these courses to your current students.

hotrice said...

So you doing the courses now, Gibble?