Using blogs for ELT purposes

If you are already familiar with blogging, things will be a lot easier, but we have to keep up the same pace so as to get everybody together.

Remember, content-producing activities can be quite frustrating if they are not well explained or guided according to our students knowledge and abilities.

Here are the things I want you to do as a first WEB Content-Producing practice.

1) Create your own blogs (in English, please). Suggestions of hosts are WORDPRESS or BLOGGER.
Note: Some bloggers open up in Portuguese, but you can easily change it to English.

2) In pairs, choose a language point to write about. Each one of you is going to take care of one aspect of that specific language point (i.e. Form and Use) and create hyperlinks that connect your posts somehow. In a way, one text should complement the other and that's exactly what we should want our students to do in a Web Content Producing activity. They'll learn how to do real collaborative work together.

3) Add an image to your blog to make it more attractive. It can be a grammar table for those who had to work with form, for example.

4) If you're ready, we can then try and link our text to an audio file that we can store on a podcast, as this song, which is a cover played by my last cover band.

5) And finally, insert a link to a video from You Tube, or any other free videos host. Remember, you and your students can use digital cameras or cell phones to record small videos and publicize them on You Tube, for example. Creating a kind of electronic portfolio for them. Remember that some bloggers do not offer this option. I haven't found that tool on Blogger, but I know on Wordpress you can surely do that.

If we've gotten here, then we'll probably be able to start carrying out those kind of Internet content-producing activities for our students, ALWAYS WITH A LEARNING POINT IN MIND.

Hope you liked it!!!