The Alpha
June 29, 2007
Where to begin?? After reading, snooping, more reading and more snooping around the edublogsphere, I find myself eager to begin a blog project with my students. I am amazed at, and overwhelmed by the amount of information there is today about edublogs, their reasons for being, techniques, faults and so forth. However, I am optimistic.
My project will involve Brazilian teenagers (14-18) in my EIL semester classes. Their English level is pre-intermediate and many of them are quite fluent orally. I will start with three different levels: Teen7, Teen8 and Teen9, which is somewhat arbitrary if you aren’t familiar with Alumni’s structure. These students are familiar with social networking and participate actively on Orkut and some of them have their own personal blogs. Because of this, I feel they will adapt easily to the blog.
Students will use the blog to post their writing assignments, make comments on others, post and comment on others’ posts relating to the topics of the course, access information relating to the course such as homework assignments and the activities during previous classes. Therefore, I will be directly involved in the blog, adding posts, comments, assignments, etc.
During the first week of classes, I will conduct a lab exercise where students will register to the blog and begin their comments and posts. I am in the midst of preparing an initial activity that I think will engage and motivate them to take the project seriously, but at the same time enjoy the experience.
