I
taught and will teach writing to students. So I mainly reflect on how to use
blogs on writing classes. I don’t think we can use blogs too much IN a typical Chinese
writing class which is too large to have students use blogs in a limited
time-frame. We may use blogs in writing workshops which may also take place in
classrooms yet are not considered as typical Chinese writing classes. I will
talk about two ways I would use blogs with my students outside the physical
classroom.
1.
Blog is a forum. Students may post anything in English, for example, stories
they like, poems they wrote, interesting news recently, their own feelings and
confusions and so on. Others can comment and interact with the bloggers. It is
like the way we are doing at LAI 590. I would suggest students to create things
of their own not only to practice their writing skills but also to attract more
comments. For example, students may keep diaries on their blogs, describe
interesting photos they took and expressed their confusions about life. Since I
think I will be teaching teenagers, I believe they have a lot of confusions to
talk about.
2.
Blog is a wiki. I may create a public blog for a workshop or a class. Students
can write together. It is a cooperative writing blog. Students contribute a
part of one task, mostly a story, individually. It could be fun. I always want
to try that with Chinese students. I did it once with one student, but not on
blog but on paper. We wrote a story together: at first it was an ordinary daily
conversation between two girls, then it lost control and turned into a horror
story. The twists were fun. I want to use a public blog as a big platform to
involve more students on such tasks.
Performance
indicators: Standard ESL.1.5-8.2
Students
will listen, speak, read and write in English for literary response, enjoyment
and expression.
Perhaps there are ways to incorporate blogs into a large writing class. For example, students could be divided into groups with each student required to read and respond to only the posts from that group. If the focus of the writing is expressing ideas and not totally accurate grammar, then the teacher would not need to read all the blogs. Perhaps after a period of time, the students could select what they consider their best post and the teacher could review that one.
ReplyDeleteAnother idea would be to have the group vote on the post they consider the best and only that one could be reviewed in some way.
Your post is well done but I think there is one mistake. You say that a blog is a wiki, but I don't think that is correct. Here's a quote from Wikipedia on that subject:
" While a wiki is a type of content management system, it differs from a blog or most other such systems in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader, and wikis have little implicit structure, allowing structure to emerge according to the needs of the users."