Blogs and Teaching

When I was assigned a reading about blogs in Dr. Burgos (Computers in L2) class, I was wondering how such tool can be beneficial in teaching English. You see, my previous experience with blogs was nothing more than viewing websites that had more text than anything else, that had no sense of organization, and that was only used to write about personal everyday activities. For me it looked like an online tool to be used for social interaction and nothing else.

After going through the assigned readings for Dr. Burgos class, I realized that blogs had as much to do with teaching as with social uses. blogs can be used as a writing tool, a portfolio, an interactive tool between teachers and students, an administrative way, a tool to connect with parents, help guide, a grading rubric, homework assignments, and many others (For more info. click here).

In my future teaching, I will use blogs mainly as a writing tool for my students. This has do with the fact that students need to familiarize themselves with such tool first. After students become familiar with it (that includes me), I will introduce other ways of using it. One idea I thought about, is having students work on their writing projects as groups, where each group will have its own blog. Students will conduct all their writing steps on the blog and they will be responding to each other making comments on each step, brainstorming, posting links for other group members to use until they write their final project. This way, students will be able to share their knowledge, correct each other, keep track of what has been done and at the same time make it easier for me to access their work and comment on it. Using blogs in writing will help students keep track of their progress and help me look back at their work as they progress to see what has improved and what needs to be improved. Another great use of blogs in writing, is that it's going to save me time by having administrators follow my class work without having to report anything.

Truly, reading about the use of blogs has opened my eyes to a wide possible ways of using it to enhance the teaching and learning of English in my classes as well as having students be part of the new information era, the one that relies on technology. Using blogs to teach writing is only one way of many that blogs can I offer and that I going to do my best to use in the future.