According
to the article of “Blogging in Language Learning”, many advantages have been
introduced about setting up a blog with students. Some of them really impressed
me so much, such as writing reflection or summary after each class, foster
group discussion about articles or textbooks, and write reviews of books that
they enjoy reading, etc. For the learners of a second language, it’s very
important to use the language they’ve learned as much as possible so that they
can make obvious progress. However, just practicing in class is far less than
enough. They need more opportunities to communicate with each other. Thus, a
blog is a nice place for them to share thoughts and communicate in target
language. For example, teacher could post a topic per week for students to
speak their minds that if some students had different opinion with the others,
they could use the evidence that they collected from other places to argue with
each other. And all these words, websites, or pictures they found were all
supposed to be relevant with the topic, and should be in target language. In
this way, teacher would better be an outsider and also a manager to make sure
that every student’s voice should be heard. Such topic could be commenting a
movie or short article, or maybe an English popular song, or something about
arts or history that students can learn not only the target language and also
the culture at the same time. According to the TESOL standards for P-12, culture is a very important part in language learning, however, most of English classes are focusing on the knowledge of language. How can we combine the culture imbuing into this language teaching process? Blog could be one of our facilitators as a display of the culture in target language, which is even more vivid than only talking in the classroom.
From my point of view, students' keeping a blog could meet the requirement of the standards in following aspects:
1. ELLs can communicate with each other for social, intercultural, and instructional purposes within the the school settings.
2. ELLs can communicate with each information, ideas and concepts necessary for academic success in the area of language arts, science and social studies.
Beyond all these school requirements, I think blog can also be a place for students to do free talk, share whatever thoughts they want. The basic line is they are using target language to communicate with each other. I think teacher's job would better be arousing their interests in keeping a blog in their second language and under this prerequisite we can choose topics as nearer as the standards claim.
Keeping a blog is not only beneficial for
the learners, teachers can also be beneficiaries too. The article “seven
reasons teachers should blog” gives us many concrete reasons why teachers
should do so. I remembered in last semester, I’ve learned that teachers should
better keep a diary or a tape record which we can investigate what we’ve done
created what results, what need to be adjusted, or to add what could solve the
problem better. Clearly, a blog is a great tool for teachers to do so. We can
write what we got after each class, students’ reactions, what particular events
in class had happened, and what we’ve learned from other teachers. Among them,
I think the greatest thing is blog can give teachers strength, especially for
new teachers. By writing down some inspiring words, share some useful and also
cheerful pictures or music, or even to write down something that made us feel
unhappy or frustrated, we can also gain power by doing all these kinds of
things in blog. Also it’s a good archive that we can keep all the good experiences
of teaching in a neat order so that it’s easy to find out in the future.
Diigo may be unfamiliar with lots of
people, at least it’s the first time for me to use this web management tool. Traditionally,
I use internet explorer to save and manage all the frequently used web pages. However,
I can only find the web sites on my own computer, and also it’s hard to share
all the interesting findings with friends. Diigo is easy to manage all your web
sites too, but it can do more than traditional explorer, you can find them on
all your devices and you can personalize your bookmarks by adding multiple tags
for each one. Moreover, by following your friends’ diigo, you can easily surf
the websites they collect and give them comment. 
Scoop.it is another useful social web tool,
it’s more like a blog that allow you to display websites and articles you would
like to share with others. Also, it has many suggestions in the field you are
searching for, which means you can get more than you’ve ordered at the same
time. But this feature is not always that useful, the suggestions it offered
are not targeted that it might be a waste of time if you read them all.
