By Barbara Dieu · November 07, 2006
This year I was fortunate enough to be able to engage two of my secondary school classes in open and participatory webpublishing (read and write web) more regularly and for a longer period. They were split in half and I’ve had them in smaller groups in the computer room for one hour (from the two other hours in class).
I managed to have them open accounts with Wordpress and other social tools like Flickr, Del.icio.us, 43Things and 43Places and Community Walk
We have inter-linked the tools so it is now possible for them to post directly from the other accounts to their main blog. They have also learnt how to aggregate friends’ blogs and interesting sites through Bloglines to be able to read the posts directly from one page.
After showing how and why to use the different tools, the moments in the lab are now devoted to reading other blogs, commenting on them and publishing their own posts. Students choose the subject and the tool they are going to work with. If they have not managed to conclude what they have set out to do during that hour, they polish it off at home.
At the end of the trimester, I check if they have accomplished the different tasks they have undertaken during the sessions and mark them symbolically for “participation” only because the system demands I do it for all work students engage in. Students KNOW however that they are not doing it for a grade.
Correction is done on the spot, when they ask me for it or later in class, to the whole group, when I notice recurring mistakes. They are encouraged to go back to their posts and rewrite them but I have found out few actually do it. They tend to forget about it once class is over.
Grammar and vocabulary are reinforced AWAY from the blogging area, on Hot Potato sites that abound on the net, grammar books or photocopies – if and only if – the need arises. If I were totally online, I would do it inside an LMS system as Aaron suggests in his Blogging for Homework post . I point them to links for more practice on static pages.
Time in class is devoted to reading, listening, speaking and discussion. More formally structured essays are submitted by mail and the correction and comments go back the same way. I have also experimented doing some group and collaborative work on wikis but the concept is not yet totally clear so I decided to re-introduce next year once they are really at ease with blogging and social tools.
Now, what I like about Wordpress is that it gives you the possibility of having a static page so I am thinking asking students at the end of the school term is to choose some of the essays they like best and archive them on the static pages as part of their learning portfolio. This will make them go over the writing they engaged in during the year, reinforce some concepts and give them an idea of their progress.
• • •
• • •
José Luis Cabello
wrote on November 18, 2006:
Wonderful experience! Keep on telling us about it, please. I have just created an esl superblog where your blog has been included (if you don’t mind).
∇
Rudolf
wrote on November 20, 2006:
Hi—we don’t mind. In fact we have already agreed to let our stuff be aggregated. In the footer of every page you will find a link to a Creative-Commons license that gives anyone the right to re-distribute our articles, providing they attribute the source and they do it “non-commercially” (whatever that means—maybe we should remove the non-commercial bit and insist on attribution only.)
If Suprglu is okay with it is another matter. Last time I checked (maybe a year ago), they insisted they wanted people to use their service only for aggregating their personal stuff. Accordingly, they limited the number of feeds you can plug into a Suprglu account to ten, if memory serves. You might want to check what their current policy is.
∇