A New Blog in the Classroom

Welcome reader, 

If you have crossed the door of this site it is because you are interested in applying technologies in the Second Language classroom. If I am right, then you are more than welcome to stay here, read the posts, and share your thoughts and believes with the other readers by commenting on the posts. 

This blog is originally a class exercise to experience new technologies and share our feelings and ideas. I'd like to open it to a professional community of Second Language Teachers interested in using technologies in their classes. 

But before starting, what is a blog? How does it work? and how can I use it in my class? A weblog is a webpage that an user can easily edit. It allows the creator to share thoughts and believes, news, or anything relevant by creating articles (posts, from now on). 

The reader can always access to the new post, but also find old ones by scrolling down the blog. This technology also allows a new way of interaction with the author since the readers can also comment on the authors' posts. 

Weblogs can be a really useful tool for our students to acquire a language because a) they can have access to real language used in a real context by native speakers, b) they can produce language with an specific purpose, and c) they can keep track of their improvements on their Second Language and gain language awareness. 

Let's imagine we are Language teachers in a Middle School and we want to improve our students' reading habits. We can use personal weblogs. Every week students have to select a book from the school library, read it, and post anything related to the book in their personal weblog: a critique, a summary, an idea related to the reading, a feeling, ...

The teacher can keep track of the books read in a wiki shared in the class, so the students have access to the links of their classmates' weblogs. Students, when select a book, can check if someone has already read it and comment on the classmates' post about their own thoughts and feelings.

This activity meets the following ACTFL Standards:

COMMUNICATION: COMMUNICATE IN LANGUAGES OTHER THAN ENGLISH (or L1)

• Standard 1.1: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions
• Standard 1.3: Students present information, concepts, and ideas to an audience of listeners or readers on a variety of topics.

COMMUNITIES: PARTICIPATE IN MULTILINGUAL COMMUNITIES AT HOME & AROUND THE WORLD

• Standard 5.1: Students use the language both within and beyond the school setting
• Standard 5.2: Students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment.

But, what about the teachers? How can we use weblogs? This technology allows you to create a professional world-wide community. As we are doing right now, we can use our own blog to share our experiences teaching, recommend a good book that helped you in your career, post links to sources so that other teachers can use them, contact language teachers around the world to start an exchange program with our students, as many other possibilities. There is thousands of professional weblogs online, I encourage you to look for some other bloggers but also to keep an eye to this weblog, you never know when the next update can be posted.