Friday, September 28, 2007

Started my Level 1 16-19 ESOL group on their blogs today. It took quite a while setting them up as the usual problems of remembering their email addresses and correctly entering data came up. But still, they seemed pretty excited by them and had a nice time changing the layout and fiddling with the font!

A few managed to get photos uploaded and a video. They were at a bit of a loss as what to write onthere...and it was dawning on me that they will need specific tasks to carry out in order for it to be useful/successful - I don't think that merely keeping an online diary will suffice.

Here are a few:
http://i267.eslblogs.org/
http://faisal07.eslblogs.org/
http://viola.eslblogs.org/
http://ming.eslblogs.org/

And Vivien sent me this link which really fuelled our imaginations:
http://wilzarbps.globalstudent.org.au/ Think that this is an excellent use of the blog format and one that might work with the teenagers...

2 comments:

Martin King said...

Wow,

Brilliant - this is moving faster than I imagined - I'm going to be so interested in seeing how this works out - it is experimental.

Your finding is the same as mine - you have to have something to say so a projet/guidance is good - not sure about ESOL but maybe they could write a paragraph on some London landmrk perhaps and maybe add a pic of the landmark - or maybe somethign about where the student came from - latr links to google maps etc.

Te same happens with any technology - the pen, the wordprocessor, video conferencing and now blogs - you have to have something to say.

great work Liz

davidbr said...

This is very interesting indeed, esp the students' blogs. I think it has great potential for giving the students the chance to express themselves.