Wednesday, August 20, 2008

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.




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Monday, April 02, 2007

ESL/EFL Wikis

ELT Teachers Using Wikis
(a mini directory)

As part of my summer learning in Jan and Feb, I joined an EVO Online workshop B4B (Blogging for Beginners). I joined quite late because I was busy designing my wiki for students. Among the participants, I found a few 'false begginers' in blogging who caught my attention for a number of coincidences:


Coincidences
  1. We have all set up our firsts blogs roughly around the same time (March 2006)
  2. We were thinking and designing our first wiki projects in January 2007
  3. We have chosen the same tools -Blogger and Wikispaces
  4. We all use del.icio.us- pab, monicabh, jenverschoor, fceblog (only Mary, kushikatsu , uses the network)

Interesting, I thought. Similar experiences, objectives and potential seamless integration of the tools we are using. Lots of collaboration/network possibilities here.

I left comments in their blogs (here and here) and emailed them separately. Only to find even more coincidences:
-Jennifer and Mônica also teach Cambridge FCE courses.
-Mônica is also studying at university and intends to use the wiki project as part of her research.

Can it get any better? We'll see.

I think you've met but...
Now it's time to get to know each other better. Here is a detail of our online work:

Mary Hillis
Blog: One Teacher's Journey
Wiki: ESL for Migrants

Paul, Pab
Blogs:
Pab's Potpourri (for teachers)
The Writing Studio (for students)
LTD Project Blog
(for teachers)
Wiki: The LTD Project
(I'm a member of this wiki)

Mônica Veado
Blog:Movie Reviews (for students)
Wiki:Movie Reviews

Jennifer Verschoor
Blogs:
My Integrating Technology Journey (for teachers)
Open Classroom (for students)
Wiki: Open Classroom

And mine
Blog: The FCE Blog (for students)
Wiki: Corpus

I will be watching how these projects evolve. I hope you also post about them. Lot's to learn from each other, don't you think?

Apart from my posts here, I will also post brief updates from my Corpus wiki (see About this project).
I'll call it PLOG, i.e. production blog.


My questions to teachers with wikified classrooms
-How are your projects getting on? What are the difficulties you are encountering? Have your students welcomed new ways of learning?

Stay in touch.
(If you write about this in your blog, please link to this post's permalink so I'll find you.)
...............................

While we wait for comments, here's a reading list:

Links to other EFL wiki projects

For teachers
Dude has a wiki about Web 2.0 tools and innovative lesson plans and ideas,
EFL and Web 2.0

EFL Geek has an ESL & EFL wiki with forums.

And Graham has more than one, I am a member of this one:
Pod-EFL all about Podcasting ideas.
Evogaming

And the Webheads love wikis too, of course!
BaW07
Open Webpublishing
Barbara Diew's authors and participates in many wikis
Not so new and with an intriguing title, Writing Matrix, makes me wonder why sometimes collaborative wiki projects do not take off.

For students
Nancy, from Canada, has a well organised wikidot. She is concise and clear. Love her style.

Illya, who teaches CAE, has a wiki to organise vocabulary.
CAE Words

From Argentina, Rita Zeinstejer -the pioneer- worked with CAE in wikispaces last year. Her students took part in the IWE wiki. I saw a wiki of hers with students describing their city. Beautiful.
(Unfortunately I lost the link. Can you add it here Rita? Your work is a seed for mine)
...............

More in my del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/fceblog/wiki

If you are not in my del.icio.us already, would you like to let us know about your wikis?


Attribution: Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net


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