Blogging4Educators: Reflections on Week One

This month, the blogs created during last year's Blogging for Beginners EVO workshop turn one-year-old! After reading a Happy Birthday message to the blogs from Monika, I was really happy to think about all the blogging we've done over the past year! Now that Blogging4Educators is in full-swing, I'm just thinking how many more blogs we'll be able to fete next year at this time.

Before the Blogging4Educators session started, Ana Maria and I were working on creating the Blogging for Educators on Blogger. I was really looking forward to the interaction that would occur there, and did it ever! At the end of week one, there were 37 comments on the post asking participants to share their personal reflections on blogging, and to my surprise, 58 comments from participants explaining the differences between blogs, wikis, and web sites in their own words! Another great thing about hosting these discussions on the blog is there is no need to thread these discussions on the wiki; all the replies can easily be accessed via the blog!

I have learned so many things already through the interaction that is happening in the group. The highlight of Week One for me was attending a live session at Wiziq. Carla A gave a concise and informative presentation on the various tools we are using for the session and their purposes. Then, almost everyone had a chance to speak, although we noticed the moderator has to keep tight control of the mic; if participants in a Wiziq session forget to mute their mics when they're not speaking, there can be a lot of noise. Finally, we all started collaborating on the whiteboard: drawing, writing, and sharing pictures. The possibilities for connecting are just amazing! The live sessions are always my favorite parts of the EVO sessions; to be with people from so many countries is always thrilling.

The Blogging Team worked for 6 months to create this year's session; however, we could never have imagined what the session would become once it got into full swing! Every morning when I check my e-mail, Twitter, RSS feeds, and so on, I am in awe of all the activity. The coming weeks will certainly be a fascinating journey for all of us. Off to bed now... Bee's presentation will start at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning for me! Blog post to follow.

Get Hip to Learning English!

The first semester of our school year has just ended. One of my major goals for the term was to use blogging with my students. I started a class blog at Motime called Get Hip to Learning English IES. Overall, it was a good experience, thanks mostly to the comments of great friends from online communities of practice! The students felt really encouraged to know that they were making connections with a larger audience.

There are some points that I want to improve about the blog for next semester. First, I want to make it more visually appealing and interesting, so students won't lose interest. Second, I hope to use the blog to conduct a collaborative online project with a guest or guests from another country. Finally, I hope to get students more involved in generating content for the class blog, or to have them start their own individual blogs. In addition to those items, I want to become involved in Dekita, and help students to create some relationships with student bloggers in Japan and other countries.

By the way, I chose the title "Get Hip to Learning English" because "to get hip to something" means to become more aware and appreciative of it (M-W Dictionary).

Since I'll be continuing the same blog with the same students in our next semester beginning in September, I'm looking forward to the chance to work toward the above goals. Please share your reflections or suggestions about blogging with students!

B4B Week Four Summary

The highlight of this week at B4B was listening to Bee and Aaron's presentation at Alado. Although they shared many helpful tips and interesting anecdotes about blogging with their students, two of their key concepts, openness and interaction, made a real impression with me. By thinking about two different online learning experiences I had, I hope I can draw on these to create the type of learning environment they discussed.

One of my first experiences with online teaching and learning was in the Fall 2005 semester and I registered for a faculty development course on Teaching Online at the community college where I was teaching English Composition. In order to be able to teach online courses, teachers had to complete this professional development course which consisted of reading a textbook, participating in the course through Blackboard, and creating some elements of an online course in our discipline. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and thought it was so interesting to meet faculty members from other departments, such as foreign languages, fire science, and nursing. Even though we worked on the same campus, we would have never had such an opportunity to meet if it weren't for this course and Blackboard.

Shortly after completing this course, I decided that I wanted to continue learning online, so I enrolled in TESOL's EVO session, Becoming a Webhead 2006. Let's just say that the difference between these two systems was a big one! In BaW, I could interact with participants from around the world and through multiple the use of online tools, including Yahoo! Groups, a blog, a PB Wiki, discussion forums, voice e-mails, and the list seems to go on and on. Whenever I logged on to the course, I never knew where I would end up or what kind of connections I would make. New tools, tips, and projects were springing up all around me and it was overwhelming and hard to keep up, but really interesting!

By thinking about these two experiences with online learning, I can see the key concepts of openness and interaction. Although I did enjoy the faculty development course on Blackboard, I wonder how the experience would have been different if we had a more open environment, where we could interact with other educators. Maybe we could have found out the ins-and-outs of teaching online from a more diverse group of students, educators, and others if portions of the course would have been conducted in a more open environment. Maybe knowledge would have been more co-constructed among the participants, rather than just received from the textbook and facilitator. As the roles of teachers, students, and technology change, so must our teaching approaches.

I have a goal to use technology in my classes in the upcoming academic year. I'll try to remember the key concepts that Bee and Aaron spoke about, especially openness and interaction!

(Image from Bee's PowerPoint presentation to BaW 07)

B4B Week Three Summary

Have I met the benchmarks for week three of Blogging for Beginners?

• Blogging: I've posted entries on Bilingual Babble, One Teacher's Journey, and Puppets in Action (Thanks, Monika, for inviting me to participate in your collaborative blog about puppets!). In the posts, I've tried to experiment a little with html tags, but nothing major. I've edited my profile to include a picture and have even been able to guide a few people through this process as well. In the coming weeks, I'd like to try out more html and play around with fonts, colors, etc.


• Comments: I've visited and commented on many of the blogs created for this session. I'm really amazed at the variety of topics covered and purposes for these blogs! And, some blogs include audio and video, so I'm eager to learn more about how to do these things too.


• Contribute to the group blog: I left a comment on blogging safely and the advantages of RSS in the classroom. Although I haven't blogged with students yet, I think that these are two areas that are really important to think about before starting, so I'm glad to have had this opportunity. At present, I think that opening up a blog written by adult students to the public has more advantages than disadvantages; sharing can be really motivating and rewarding in a number of ways. Then, as the article points out, using RSS has numerous advantages for both students and teachers. One thing I still need to do is explore Bloglines, Netvibes, and others more.


• Feedblitz session: Although I wasn't able to attend the live session with Phil Hollows from Feedblitz, I checked out his PowerPoint presentation and subscribed to the B4B blog with this service. When I received an e-mail from Feedblitz about a new post to the B4B blog, I was really impressed with the layout and both the text and images from the post were included.

I'm looking forward to week four where we'll learn more about blogging pedagogy!

Choosing an Educational Blog Host

After last week's discussion at Blogging for Beginners, I'm wondering which educational blog host our members have chosen to use with their classes. Also, I'm eager to try out this new "Help Me Choose" widget from Kaboodle; its only drawback is that I can only include three choices. So, if you had to choose from Blogger, WordPress, or Free ESL Blogs, which one would you choose?

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