Suburban Bloggers

Suburban Bloggers
Blogging with EFL Students at Elementary Level.

This is how the blogging project was born.

We are online now.
http://suburban.tumblr.com/

The students decided to call our group blog Suburban. It is actually a metaphor, meaning we are still not city dweller in the use of the English language. We want to approach the neighbourhood by the suburbs.

The bloggers
This is a small group of beginners in English. they started their first level in March. They have had approximately 60hs of instruction. They are all 18+ years old. I advised them to use their first names only while online. It will be up to them to publish their own picture.

H0w I introduced them to the concept of blogging
While in class at the lab, I asked my students to point their browsers to my Playground Tumblr blog -a kind of sandbox.
I encouraged them to read how I was playing and discovering with the tool together with other teachers in my network.

Technical aspects
While they read, I created the group account and asked them to confirm their membership via email. One of my students had never had an email account before. So we opened one.

They posted a couple of trials, which they decided to delete. Then , they discovered they could edit on and on.

I briefly explained to them how to tag. We use tags a name signatures of our posts.

First Steps and Outcomes

Writing our first posts at the lab, there were moments of writer's block, moments of sudden enthusiasm. They had lots of questions on how to express exactly what they meant. They asked me to proofread before posting.

Reading our posts

This was the peak of excitement and surprise. They laughed a lot. They were amazed.

Here our first production:

A welcome post inviting to write fiction, not homework.

A description of what the day looked like from our window.

The student who first came up with the idea of writing fiction is sharing a suburban boy's s life story. A boy who belongs to a family struggling to make ends meet. A gem.