Friday, February 7, 2014

Why teachers would better keep a blog? It's helpful for both teachers and students.

      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.

10 comments:

  1. Your ideas for using blogs are very good, but you need to include in this post which one of the following specific standards your student blogging would meet:
    Standard 1: English language learners communicate for social, intercultural, and
    instructional purposes within the school setting.
    Standard 2: English language learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the area of language arts.
    Standard 3: English language learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the area of mathematics.
    Standard 4: English language learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts
    necessary for academic success in the area of science.
    Standard 5: English language learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the area of social studies.
    Actually the ACTFL standards for foreign language learning might work better than the TESOL standards because the TESOL standards are designed for use in a second language setting rather than a foreign language setting, but you can choose to use either one.

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  2. The image that you used is not really appropriate because it refers to the standards that teachers should meet, not the learning standards for students.

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    Replies
    1. Sorry, I misunderstood about the picture, already delete it.

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  3. I like that you have the idea of a blog as a weekly reflection tool. Having the opportunity to post your opinions and explore the material outside of the classroom is a valuable space to create. This can allow those who might not talk in class, or those who feel embarrassed to share in class the opportunity to still contribute and have a voice.

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  4. Chao, I like your view of regarding blog as a form of diary or record, which Lihan also mentioned. We could self-examine and make adjustment in time. Also, using blog for inspiring ourselves is wonderful! I've been reading so many encouraging sentences and articles by bloggers, which really gives me courage and strength!

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  5. I reread your post and you do refer to the standards although you compressed several of them into one through paraphrasing.

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  6. Chao, I really like your idea of blogging being used to help ELL's become familiar with the target language culture. It is true, ESL classrooms put a lot of focus on the knowledge of language and not enough on the culture of the target language. I also really like your idea about the teacher posting a weekly topic for students to comment on, this would be a good way to help ELL;s become familiar with current events and practice critical thinking and writing in the target language.
    Sincerely
    Angela

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  7. Hi Chao, from your blog I learnt the variety of materials that we can use for students to make comments or post their ideas about them. Like movies and songs, they are really interesting. And I also agree with the idea that blog can not only benefit the learners but also the teachers. As future language teachers, we can keep dairies and reflections, as well as some journals, to make records of our teaching activities and facilitate our future improvements. Blog is a great Internet tool that I learnt for now. Thank you for sharing.

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  8. I think it would be a very productive discussion if students came to class with evidence supporting their arguments, it would also be a great way to prepare students in advance for an upcoming lesson or think through opinions.

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