Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Blogs as course book supplements


This year I've decided to try something new with the class blogs. I thought that it could be used as a kind of wiki page in order to compliment the course books we're using for the Proficiency course. The basic idea is that either I, or preferably the students, post links to anything we see on the internet that is connected with the subject matter in the unit we're doing.

For example, we happen to be on unit two of the Masterclass Proficiency book (as dull as ditch water, to tell you the truth) and we've covered topics such as Stephen Hawkings, Frankenstein and women in science. In each case we found some links that help students do some extra practice at home, if they wish. So, they are links to a free audio book version of Frankenstein, videos of women scientists presenting their work at TED and the like. The emphasis is on enriching audio/video content of the course as listening skills are woefully neglected in most course books at this level.

In addition I want to include more videos from YouTube and Google Video in the future.

3 comments:

Sean said...

Brilliant. I think I may try this myself in the future.

teacher dude said...

Glad you liked it. Tell me how it works out for you, if you decide to do it.

Theodora Papapanagiotou said...

Maybe I'll try that in the future as well. It's really hard for a whole class to keep a blog if you're not supervising... It seems to work great for your students this "link" idea!