Reflecting on my previous seven-year teaching experiences at cram schools in Taiwan, I found that I myself barely used Internet as a medium to interact with my students except asking them to email me their writing assignments for grading. However, after reading chapter 1, 2 and 3 of Will Richardson, I am now much clear about how to apply blogs to my future teaching. In order to use blogging as one of my teaching methods, the followings are my ideas for using blogs in my future class.
*In my blog, I will share and update many useful links for learning English on-line in terms of academic or entertaining websites. In this way, students can enjoy various English on-line materials in their spare time so as to motivate their learning.
*In my blog, I will regularly post journals sharing reflections, sharing English teaching/learning experience, sharing current life, or sharing movie reviews. I would like to be a teacher not just teaching them in class but to be the one who can share many things in life with them. Hopefully, by doing so, there would be more interaction between my future students and me.
*In my blog, I would like to recommend my students to read (watch) inspiring, thought-provoking, positive, entertaining, interesting or touching English books/ movies. I hope by recommending them those can not only motivate them to be active in learning but also bring good influence on them in terms of cognitive development.
*In my blog, since I will keep teaching exam-oriented class. In other words, most of the time, the class is still a teacher-centered one though I want to modify it as 70 percent teacher-centered and 30 percent student-centered. Therefore, setting up a blog for them can provide students with a voice to talk or discuss English questions with me as opposed to traditional classroom settings where some students might be too shy to express themselves.
*Last but not least, in my blog, I hope that students’ parents can join the on-line community I set up by giving me any comment, advice, critique. In addition, I would like to make my blog a communication center for them. Through my blog, they can talk to me freely about their kids’ English learning at home or at school or even they can ask me any question because I will be willing to answer for solving English problems.
Finally, those ideas will be my major tenets for how to use blogging as one of the teaching methods. But, I may add or drop some ideas according to my current teaching orientation then. I truly hope that I can successfully apply blogging to teaching in my future class soon!
5 則留言:
You have outlined some very good uses of blogs. I would not, however, use a blog to have parents discuss specific learning difficulties of their children because the blog is open to the public and that would be better done through email or by phone. If however, you meant that parents would be commenting in general terms about assignment, then a blog would work.
De. Burgos
Please remove the comment moderation feature from this blog. Although it may be a good feature for a class blog, for our purposes in this course, it makes things very inconvenient.
Dr. Burgos
Thank you for your advice, Dr. Burgos! I did not think about the consquence of discussing learning difficulties of their children in the blog since it is a public place! Thanks for reminding me of that. Perhaps I can create another blog for parents only! Will that work?
I think your blog ideas could be great for students learning English. I especially think that blogging about movies and books could really encourage students to practice their English. The students would not only encounter the language in the movies and books, but they would also comment in English. I think it could be great practice for the students.
My concern with the parents blogging, is would they know English? In my experience, my English language learners do not speak English at home. Therefore, I think the parents would have a hard time communicating on the blog unless you also had it in their native language.
Ming-Chuan,
I don't think blogs are a good vehicle for interaction between a teacher and parents for discussing a specific student's problems. E-mail or phone calls work better for that. However, a class blog that keeps parents informed of class activities and assignments could be very useful.
Dr. Burgos
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