Our English Class Two

Rudolf wrote on May 21, 2005:

Rosa kindly agreed to take questions here on Dekita.org.

So, to begin at the beginning—Rosa, how did you get started on this project?

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rosa wrote on May 22, 2005:

Hi Rudolf and all,
I was lucky enough to attend an information session about online teaching at work (August 2004) and got really interested in the blog as a possible ESL class tool. My children had their own geocities websites, so I thought “if they can do it, I can do it too”. I then enrolled in an introduction to online teaching which gave me a sound theoretical base. This together with my hands-on approach with blogger and geocities, got me immersed in a great learning adventure, for myself and my students.

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Bee wrote on May 22, 2005:

You use the metaphor “great learning adventure”. Can you share with us some of the “hi’s and lo’s” you and your students have experienced along your blogging journey?

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rosa wrote on May 23, 2005:

The very first thing that comes to mind is dealing with a class of computer-mixed ability. Some students were computer literate, some weren’t. In the past I’ve taught ESOL classes a gradual introduction to typing skills, Internet and Word processing. This time I thought I would go straight into blogging. It has worked thanks mainly to peer collaboration. But it was hard getting some students an email account plus a blog account in one go. We are still having problems with remembering which username and/or password were used for what! So one of us has got about three different blogs!

Personally, it has been a great learning curve. I’m even using HTML to cheat the template and create tables and a bit of fancy transparency work.

But I still have a lot to do. I think I should encourage my students to write more freely. They are still worried about making mistakes. I’ve prepared (draft stages) some reading about this and more work on reading the wonderful work of other ESL?EFL students (Patrick, Natalie, Melanie….). So keep watching!

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Rudolf wrote on May 23, 2005:

As you try to encourage your students “to write more freely”—have you considered introducing a greater degree of anonymity? As it is, most of your students seem to be using their real names, they have their photos posted, it’s known where they live, which school they attend, and some of the assignments invite them to share some rather private details. They might be more forthcoming if their writing wasn’t so easily traceable to a real person.

Moreover, is a public weblog really a place that invites students “to write more freely”? Maybe the presence of an unseen readership is inhibiting rather than liberating—in which case it might be preferable to move the weblogs behind a password prompt and shut out everyone else?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, by the way; I really don’t know, and the right answer may well vary from case to case. Have you asked your students if they’d feel more at ease behind closed doors?

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rosa wrote on May 23, 2005:

Rudolf, you are asking very valid questions. The idea of the class blog started as an internal tool: teacher-students. I never thought that it would become a public entity with an outside audience. So there was no need to protect students from an unknown danger.

Later on, after exploring ESL blogs “out there” I started thinking that it would be great for my students to connect with other people. I was fortunate to find Teresa Almeida dEca and had some exchanges with her Have Fun with English blog. This is when we became “public”. I have asked my students about it and they all seem to be OK with having their photos on the class blog (they post them to their individual blogs themselves) We discussed the need for privacy, agreeing in being very careful not to publish personal details, like addresses and phone numbers, particularly those of others. They are adults and have total control of their individual blogs.

I think this would be a great topic of discussion for our class’ weekly forum.

How do other people feel abut it? I know schools with blogs have strict guidelines about privacy, what about adult class blogs?

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Rudolf wrote on May 24, 2005:

When you say that your first weblog was an “internal tool”—you’re referring to Our Class, right? Which is, of course, a Blogger site and as “out there” as any other site on the public Web. Let me just clarify what I meant: there are software packages such as Moodle and Drupal (both of which are open source and therefore available at no charge) which make it easy to create a set of weblogs in a Web space from which the rest of the world is shut out. I sometimes wonder if such spaces couldn’t provide a comfort zone that students would find easier to deal with than a public weblog—particularly if they come from a, shall we say, more “reticent” and group-oriented culture, as Asian people in particular usually do.

You say you want students to “connect with other people” through their weblogs. How important is this aspect for you? I’d imagine that for an ESL teacher in Australia it is a great deal less important than for an EFL teacher in a country where native or advanced speakers of English are hard to come by and where the Internet offers the best shot at anything like “immersion” or “authentic” communication with native speakers.

Also, when your students “connect with other people”—that would typically happen as part of an arrangement with a teacher in another country—as opposed to “connections” with people who are not part of a course at all but happen to read weblogs and maybe even write one themselves?

I’m asking because I see a number of teachers, including you, who make student run Blogger sites, and who use the Blogger comments to point out errors, to correct misspellings and to make the usual teacherly gestures towards improving their students’ English. I wonder, if the aim is for students to “connect” with other people “out there”, isn’t this practice counter-productive, because it sends a clear “Do Not Disturb—Teaching in Progress” signal to any would-be commenter who isn’t part of the educational setup?

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rosa wrote on May 24, 2005:

I chose blogs for the simple reason that it was what I was introduced to at that initial workshop.So I thought I would try to learn how to use them as a supplement of offline teaching, a motivator and an introduction to the medium for my students. I probably will try Moodle to get to know it. Then I will be able to compare and decide which one serves our purpose better.

By connecting with other peole, I meant exactly what you said: other people in the same situation: learning English. Students can see what other EFL/ESL students are doing and learn from it.

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Rudolf wrote on May 24, 2005:

Moodle requires a bit of familiarity with Web servers to set up. I was thinking the other day we might run a copy of Moodle here on Dekita and let people play around with it…

You mentioned you were trying to get other teachers at your school interested in the Internet as a teaching tool. Any progress yet?

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Phil wrote on May 24, 2005:

Anonymity would be a major issue for me, since most of my students here at the Lycée Astier are minors. However, I’m seriously considering as a first stage at least using a blog for communication between teachers who are multiple partners of an e-twinning exchange program. With students, I’m still leery. I’m eager to hear more about your experiences so I can really judge whether it’s going to work in my context or not.

Cheers, —- Phil

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Phil wrote on May 24, 2005:

I should add, concerning anonymity, that for me as a teacher here in France, it isn’t just a question of comfort. I am required to protect my students’ anonymity, and individual student pictures associated with student names are strictly forbidden. While I personally think that any whacko would have a much easier time of it parking outside a school than trolling the internet, these things do happen, and kids under age 18 do get involved with or even abused by older men due to contacts made over the internet, so anonymity is important.

This said, in the forums on Viva , we decided it was sufficient for students to use only their first names. I found keeping track of pseudonyms too confusing, and since pictures were right out, that wasn’t an issue anyway. We put our students’ writing out there where anonymous readers could go through it, and did not have a strict correctness policy. I found that it was a good tool for promoting student writing, for most of the reasons cited above. But the biggest motivation was having partner classes and students who were participating in the same forums and often writing on the same topics. As soon as our overseas participants started to dry up, the very raison d’être of our project came into question.

Cheers, —- Phil

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Mariann wrote on May 25, 2005:

Hi, all of you,

for me blogging is a great way of self-expression. I find it very important to show the kids the possibilities and then hope they will use them by themselves later on. That is, I do not find it a problem if publicity makes students write in a slightly different (not natural) way-in fact all school-based teaching seems a bit artificial to me. But once they know the hows and whys they can set up an own blog and manage it themselves, using their English- and then it is the parnts’ task to control the privacy of the kid’s details.

Love
Mariann
Hungary

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rita wrote on May 26, 2005:

I come from China. I’ve been in Australia for seven months.When I was in China, I could speak a little English. But when I came to Australia, I realised that if I can’t speak and understand English well, it will be very difficult to live here. So I decided to study English in AMEP class. I’m very glad that I have my own webblog to study English. I hope everyone can link to my blog and make friends with me. That is very good to improve my English.
I’m not worried about people reading my blog. I don’t write personal details, like my full name or address in it.

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