Wednesday, March 24, 2010

A Great New Site for Blogging

While hunting for something else with Google, I found this great site for ESL teachers and students. There are videos and grammar helps and vocabulary building and pronunciation help and more, but there is also a place where students can register and post their own blogs or comment on other blogs. I put this site on Blackboard for the advanced students and I will ask them to register and try it out tomorrow. I'm not sure if we'll be able to do anything in one day because the web site needs to process the registration.
The web site is: http://www.englishclub.com/index.htm

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Final Project II

I tried having the students use Twitter to answer a question which I required them to answer with a sentence containing an adjective clause. I had planned to collect the sentences in my account that I created for this purpose, and then have all the students read the sentences and analyze them for any errors. Unfortunately many students had a great deal of trouble getting into their Twitter accounts. I projected the sentences that some of the students managed to send. I realized what I should have done was to make this a 2 day project. I should have just made the rounds helping the student who were having problems and give the students who were successful another assignment, and then, display all the sentences the next day. I'll try this again.
I still think that having the students write a blog telling about their experiences or sharing what they've learned would be an interesting thing for them to do. I'm giving this some thought.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Twitter

Tomorrow I'm going to try Rita's suggestion and have the students tweet messages to me on my twitter page, where they are collected, and then project their answers so we can discuss what each student wrote.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Blogs

I tried the blog link in the Blackboard site for advanced oral communication. I'm not really sure what's different about it than discussion board but the students responded with "are we blogging?" They seemed to be excited about the idea. So, I decided to have the students try a real blog. On the site for sharing power point presentations there was one about getting started with a blog. I thought I'd show them that and then sign up for their own blog. It might be interesting for them to share their experiences about coming to a new country and see if they get some responses. I watched the video about ESS feeds, but that was only for signing up to get news. We have the one Rita created for our class so I need to find out how that is done. The students might also have to sign up for Twitter and start by following someone who has had the same experiences.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

A Blog on Blackboard

I added a blog to two of my Blackboard sites (groups 5 and 6). I asked the students to blog about their opinion of the classes so far. I think they can do this anonymously as I checked that box. So far, I've had no takers. I hope they respond. For one thing I'd like to know if it's working. I'll check again tomorrow.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Did I lose my last post?

How long does it take for a post to appear? I added a post about google tools. It's not there!