Week 1: Blogging with students: My experience

Today I did my reading on Blogging for ELT . The article strenghtened my belief in the importance of blogging with students as a new learning tool.

I also read two excellent posts by fellow bloggers Azhar and Cami, where they give examples of how to engage students in blogging projects.

Now I would like to share my personal experience with you. I have been blogging with my students for a year now. However, we started off with Ning, which is rather a social network, not a blogging platform, although blogging and commenting are possible. The reason I chose Ning was that it presented the opportunity to create a virtual classroom and a safe environment. Now I must say that my students were 16 years old at that time and all of them had been well-experienced in social networking websites in general and Facebook in particular.

However, most of them were first-time bloggers and this is where our Ning network proved of great value in helping them overcome their fears of having their thoughts read by a wide audience of known and unknown readers. After some time we opened up the door to a class of sophomores from Colorado and both blogging and commenting flourished.

Later on I created a Learner Blog on Edublogs. Each of my students was given their own blog and I was proud when I saw how positively they responded to the new environment. However, at the end of school year they told me they were in favour of the Ning site, as it gave them a strong sense of belonging and togetherness.

Week 1: The beginning of a new learning journey

I have just embarked upon a new learning adventure and I'm very pleased to be one of the 30 life-long learners from all over the world who decided to spend their summer holidays on learning how to enhance their teaching practices with new technologies.

The course "Building teaching Skills Through The Interactive Web" is taking place on Nicenet, a virtual classroom. Having introduced ourselves to other course members, we have now taken on a new task of creating our new blogs, where we will reflect upon what we learn from each other and how we can use our newly-acquired knowledge in the classroom.

I have been blogging for quite a while and creating a new blog specifically for this course was not a difficult task for me. By following the step by step guide, a new blog can easily be created.

This blog is my window to the world and I'm looking forward to sharing ideas and thoughts with you.