Blogs in Teaching

Assignment 6.1:

A. What is BLOG?

Some of you may have bee very familiar with BLOG and some may have not. BLOG is a very potential tools for communiating ideas and have interactions. Writers can easily interact with readers through blog asynchronously. They can also use blog for networking ideas among realted blogs. Thus, they help grow information faster and faster. Nowadays, there have been million of blogs out there in the Internet hosted by either free blog providers like WORDPRESS, BLOGGER, TUMBLR or by the paid provider like NING. 

What is actually a blog?  This video helps to understand the concept of blog.

B. Blog for teaching

Blogging is one way to help students and teachers to communicate in the virtual world. Through blog they can easily share information, resources in the form of pictures, videos, audio and different kind of file types. The features available in blog enable teachers to easily delivers materials and lesson to their students without worrying about time and distance. But how to use blog for teaching. The following websites will give you a step by step practical information that will help you understand about blogging for teaching, how to have one,  how to use it for teaching etc.:

1. http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2012/06/ultimate-guide-to-use-of-blogs-in.html

There is also another  information on Blogging for ELT, which has been increasingly popular as a language learning tool, published by The British Council here:

2.       https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/blogging-elt

And a research paper about blogs in ELT which shows how blog can be useful media to facilitate collaborative learning and language skills development

3.       http://www.nus.edu.sg/celc/research/books/relt/vol6/no2/1-20blackstone.pdf

And some other ideas for using blog in the classroom can be found here:

4.       http://www.teachersfirst.com/content/blog/blogideas2.cfm

C. Microblogging for teaching

Then what is microblogging? Many of us has probably been familiar with twitter, right? If you are not yet then probably you may need to check this video about twitter. Twitter is an example of Microblogging besides Facebook, Plurk, Path,Google+ etc, one of them may have also been your favorite social networking sites. Microblogging is a site where people post opinion, activities, links, images etc. Since it is a 'micro' blog then the post can usual short, which is not more than 140 characters. This microblog is gaining more popularity because of few things such as:

1. Accessible from various portable devices.
2. No need for long posts like we do in BLOG. In Microblog poeple can just 'shout' in written whatever they want in publish it.
3. It's easy to do the post or status update
4. The subscription feature help instant communication and knowledge sharing

But how can the microblog be usefull for language teaching and learning? The following links will give us ideas on how we can use microblog such as twitter for language teaching and learning, so check them out:

1. Twitter for laguage learning and teaching 
2. Ideas for using Twitter in languge classroom 

Assignment 6.2: ( Individual task)

1. Set up a blog in any blogging servers you like such as in: Wordpress, Edublogs, Blogger, Google Sites, or Tumblr. for tutorials on how to setup blog click here for BLOGGER users and click here for WORDPRESS users
2. Make sure there are the following sections :

• About you (where you write your curriculum vitae),  
• EFL Teaching resources (where you make an ‘annotated list’ of the websites for teaching and learning English available on the Internet). Here is an example of ‘annotated list’ of websites: http://titova.ffl.msu.ru/for-teachers/web-20-tools.html OR http://ed.fnal.gov/trc_new/url_index.html Your resources must consists of web articles, journal, websites, video, powerpoint slides and podcast.
• Portfolio (upload your work (products that you have made during the semester) here) give annotation to every link or work you share here.
• Teaching Ideas ( Write your ideas about how to use specific technology for EFL teaching and learning activity). For example: write down step by step plan on teaching English using facebook, twitter, mindmap, etc. minimum 3 plans

3.       Post your daily journal in your blog.

4.       Send me the link of your blog! As soon as you set it up. You donot have to finish all the contents of the blog now. But you have to         start working on it now and build your blog through out the semester.

5.     At the end of the semester your blog should be completed with things as mentioned in point 2 above. This blog will be part of your final assessment.