For my course: INNOVATIVE TEACHING PRACTICES SUPPORTED BY THE FOCUSED USE OF ICT TOOLS IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM (20K9906AV128)
Dear colleagues,
Some years ago I decided to create blogs for my students and this was the result. I did it mainly to offer an alternative to classes, to extend my students' learning experience beyond the classroom, not to substitute their actual lectures, of course. I remember having difficulties getting some sleep at the time, so I decided to use that situation to my advantage: teaching myself how to blog, creating wiki spaces, learning how to use Moodle, Google classroom...anything I could in order to make my teaching experience more challenging as well as making the most of my long nights awake. At the time my only responsibilities were me and my classes, so I was a happy camper doing all of this. I learned a lot, my students loved it and it was all a win-win situation, despite my sleep deprivation. I created at least 10 of them, one for each course I had to teach back then, which was basically almost every CEFR level, from A2 to C1 (more recently).
Some of the blogs were nicer than others, but they all share more or less the same structure. I liked the idea of creating tabs to organize the four skills (listening, writing, speaking, reading), as well as other sections such as "What's in", "Music", "Thoughts", "Humor", "Literature", "Media" and on and on. I posted almost daily, at least 3 times a week, so blogs were updated regularly. I was very enthusiastic also with students contributing and getting feeds, as well as subscribing to their class blog. This one in particular was for CAL students, one of the best 5 groups of students I have had in 11 years. They were so into it that they kept following it years after their course was over and were actively involved long after. Ever since I saw how motivating blogs were for students I could not go without one the subsequent years in any of my classes. I am very pleased today, taking this course with Juan Antonio Daza, remembering these days of blogging and certainly excited to learn more and more for my own satisfaction and definitely for my students.
Inma.
