And another...

I introduced blogs to my other upper intermediate class and they seemed interested and I sent out the invitation email.

So far, three students in total (about 30 students) have joined the blog, but only one has posted - EICUIB1000 Class Blog: Introductions. I like the way that she (Tina) has taken some initiative with her post; not only has she offered a short introduction, but has started to exploit the interactive nature of the class blog, by asking other class blog memebers to give her some holiday advice.

First Step

Today I introduced the class to the idea of having a class blog and they seemed genuinely interested. I took a laptop to the class and during lesson break, I let students add their email addresses to the invitation form, three at a time. For homework, I asked students to post their introduction (using mine, which is alreadly on the blog, as a model) and to comment on one or two other introductions. I wonder how many students will write...

Change of plan

I have decided to change the plan for tomorrow. As I have 18 students, it really won't be feasible to create 18 learner blogs, particularly as there are only 18 laptops; instead, I shall simply get email addresses from all interested students and after class, via email, invite all of them to join the class blog (and create blogger accounts). Then, once there has been some activity(!), it should be possible, and less unwieldy than maintaining individual blogs, to have weekly sessions on the laptops where students can read the various posts and post short commments on the class blog. I hope some of the students will be keen to post after class too...
So, tomorrow the beginning of two class blogs...

Johnson - Creating a Writing Course Utilizing Class and Student Blogs (I-TESL-J)

Johnson - Creating a Writing Course Utilizing Class and Student Blogs (I-TESL-J)

An interesting article focusing on setting up class and individual student blogs.
He presents the class blog as a relatively non-interactional tool (more like Campbell's 'Tutor Blog' primarily informative). I intend to create a more interactive class blog (see previous post).
However, he offers some very practical guidance about setting up individual blogs. He advises the teacher to set up learner blogs in the classroom (students come to the computer one by one and enter blog information - student name = blog tile, create URL, choose template, etc), and then the teacher invites the learner onto the blog in the normal way (using the student's real email address). Of course, the student will still need to create a blogger account, even after accepting the blog invitation.
I think I will try this approach rather than the one I outlined earlier - mainly because having students come to the computer will serve as a brief introduction to the idea of blogging and they will almost certainly all have their own email addresses (and I won't need the degree of control that the other system offered).
I have my first class tomorrow. If there's time, we will start creating; otherwise, Thursday morning.
I wonder if other teachers have set up class blogs and what setting up procedure they used...

HCMC Class Blog

HCMC Class Blog

I have just set up a class blog. At the moment the contributors, excepting myself, are fictitious (examplelearnerone, examplelearnertwo, etc), as I didn't know the names of the students. I also thought it might be sensible for our first blog to do a lot of the setting up for the students. This is how I set up the classblog:

1. Created a yahoo email account and a blogger account
2. Sent an invitation email to my yahoo account.
3. Accepted the invitation and created a new blogger account for the learner (examplelearnerone).
4. Repeated this process.

The next step will be to change the example names to real names. This process is timeconsuming, but may in fact be easier to manage than having students create their own blogger accounts and then inviting each student to the class blog and then accepting each student, etc. We shall see...

BALL

This is a blog about the use of blogs in ELT, in theory and practice.