blogging and teaching ESF/EFL

I thought I'd sit down and look at what I have managed to achieve over the year as far as the application of new ideas in the classroom. Probably best to start with blogging.

Someone once defined the blogosphere as 23 million people who can't spell "definitely". Bad spelling and satire aside, I still believe that blogging is a powerful teaching tool which can help our students achieve their goals.

My experience of blogging in the classroom

I have to admit that as far as class blogs are concerned the results have been mixed to say the least. While we started the year with lots of enthusiasm and a lot of student contributions, however, this died off drastically after Christmas and didn't really recover. So for the majority of my students at school blogging had little or no effect on their English language skills.

Possible explanations

1 Lack of access to PCs and/or the internet. With just one computer available at the school, access to blogs was virtually impossible. As a result teaching the basics of blogging such as using hyperlinks or adding photos was difficult and so when students ran into problems at home they gave up in most cases.

2 Blogger is not the most intuitive of programmes, it has a plenty of quirks and definitely needs practice and patience.

3 Teacher input. Whilst I have become an enthusiastic blogger I failed to show the same enthusiasm with my student's blogs, which meant that the students probably got the message that blogging was unimportant and therefore unnecessary. For a long time I kept on reminding students to do various exercises I had set them on their blog but time and time again there was little or no response. As a result I demanded less and less from my students as far as blogging was concerned.

4 Lack of integration of blogging in to the rest of the curriculum. I made the mistake of assuming that somehow once students learnt about blogging they would continue with little or no encouragement from me. This turned out not out be true. Blogging was seen as unconnected with the rest of the course which prepares students for the Cambridge FCE/CAE/CPE exams in May (we have an enormous amount of material to cover in the course which means extra stuff such as blogging is never our first priority).

In part, this is because blogging is very much my idea and not one implemented by the school in general.

I think that students felt that blogging was just a novelty, irrelevent to their goal which was an exam certificate. And to a certain extent they were right. As this was the first time I had tried to introduce the internet into classroom teaching I had overestimated its appeal to others.

As far as my private lessons are concerned the results were much more encouraging. Many of my students are producing wonderful work on their blogs and have embraced the technology. I have even had a couple of cases of my students teaching friends and siblings how to blog.

I put down this success to the fact that in my private lessons I create my own curriculum which is less reliant on course books and also I got to integrate blogging more effectively. Of course, as the lessons are one-on-one it is much easier to monitor progress and correct any problems as soon as they appear.

Lessons to be learned

1 Blogging, like any teaching technique, needs work. It is not a magic wand which will solve all your problems. It a major investment in both time and effort.

2 At least as far as class blogs are concerned, students need to be given a clear, achievable goal. This also needs to be monitored carefully.

3 We need to set aside time to teach the fundamentals of blogging, don't take it for it granted that your students have even basic computing skills.

4 Make time in lessons to help students what they want to write on the blog in class. Remind students that a blog needs pictures and links to make it more interesting.

5 Explain, explain and explain why blogging will help them pass exams, You'll need to do this throughout the whole year.