After 5-6 months of blogvangelism, not sure how many of our workshop participants has actually realised the use of edublogs in their teaching and learning. If you are one of them reading this post and you have been/started introducing blogs to your students, do let us know 😉
As I have shared with Jeanne the other day, (edu)blogs, unlike other edtech, can quite easily be integrated into existing classroom practices. So from now on, we are going to embark on another dimension of our sharing, to scout for local Singapore examples of teachers who too have experimented with edublogs.
So, to get our “Showcasing local stories” series going, the first one that I am going to share is the “Fun with English” blog, by Mrs Letitia Tan from Beatty Sec School.
Mrs L Tan is an EL teacher. Gathered from her blog, she would like to “interest students in the eng language” via “spontaneous writing in a more creative and casual way”. Great!
She has employed the students 1-to-1 approach of using blogs on Blogger.com, so in her blog, she has linked up to the blogs of classes 3E2 and 3E4 students.
To start everything going in the right perspective, she has set ground rules for the students to follow. Read on if you are interested to find out more!
Ground rules: (Quoted from Mrs L Tan)
1 Set the rules for writing. E.g. Students had to write in complete sentences and no sms spelling etc.
2 Uploaded the rules and instructions on my main blog.
3 Got the students to type out Spontaneous Writing ex. on the topic “All about Myself”. I thought this was a good topic for blogging as the sec three students came from different classes and would be curious to read about their new friends.
4 Students were cautioned on what not to write. E.g. personal details and negative comments.
5 Read and checked their scripts. Advised them to remove personal details like phone numbers and addresses.
6 Found out which computer lab could be used and booked that lab.
7 Checked out the lab to ensure that computers were sufficient and in working order etc.
8 Made arrangements for TA to be present to help.
9 Instructed students to make available their script for uploading. They were advised to save it in space disks online so that they need not worry about bringing their diskettes or thumb drive.
10 Collected students’ passwords using namelist.
11 Collected students’ blog addressess.
12 Linked up all the students’ blog addresses to my blog.
13 Got permission from students’ of both classes in order to link their blogs to my main blog. This is so that they can read the blogs of students in each others’ classes.
Some findings after trying out blogs:
Findings:-
1 Some beautiful blogs.
2 Many students enjoyed the lesson. They asked for more.
3 Some links on my blog were broken links due to wrong addresses submitted.
Problems:-
1 No time to bring them back for more.
Potential :-
1 Could get students to share their good compositions with their friends through their blogs. Asked a few to do so already. Will be checking.
Great work isn’t it! If you are teaching EL, you may want to follow what Mrs L Tan has tried with your students. If you have any further questions, feel free to leave them in the “Comments” link following this post, cheers!