Getting started on Weblogs requires a commitment on the part of the teacher to dedicate his/herspare time creatively blogging for her own writing and creativity. If we don't don't know how to use it ourselves, we can't expect our students to embrace it. Most of our students are using blogs as a social network and not for critical thinking and reflection. If we use the blog as an educational tool it will make our students better readers and thinkers.
Starting small by posting assignments and links would be a good starting point. Next, I would encourage students to respond to the posts on the class blog based on a simple question of the day in Spanish. I went to a foreign language seminar with a great presenter who actually called his students on his celll phone and spoke to them about a brief topic for a homework assignment! The blog would be a good way to get writing feedback, but would not be as effective as this for speaking evaluation. However, many basic grammatical concepts could be posed as questoins with each student answering as a homework assignment. I'm still unsure about giving each student his or her own blog until the administration gives us some clear guidelines. Until then, I plan to start small and work my way up. I think as we try each new small thing, we'll see what works best for our subject matter.
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