Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Recommencing...

This blog has been about learning to blog. Since I am still learning, it seems appropriate to come back to it.

I now have 3 blogs, or 4, depending on how you count:
1. this one
2. "Learning English at MEI," http://umei003rwg@blogspot.com, my first class (team) blog, done in collaboration with my intermediate ESL students at the Maryland English Institute, University of Maryland (College Park, USA). Features student paragraphs and essays, diary entries, recommendations and final reflections on the class. I recently managed to add links to individual student blogs which certain students created to fulfill an assignment to keep a diary over spring break.
3. "AGU in American 2006", http://agu2006.blogspot.com, a new blog-in-progress related to the two-week American English and Culture program for students from Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. When the ~20 participants have received their visas, I want to encourage them to visit and comment on the blog as a way of initiating interaction with them before they even come here. When they are here, I plan to transform that blog into a team blog and also have each participant create a culture diary/blog in which to record his/her impressions and reflections of the program (with links to the main blog of course!).
4? A little bloglet attached to my Frappr map. This seems to elicit no comments from anyone, so maybe it's just for my eyes.
5? A couple of posts on my personal blog at http://webheadsinaction.org, also eliciting no reactions from anyone.

I have already submitted a proposal for the WATESOL Fall Convention in October for a demonstration entitled "Blogging 101" or some such thing. I want to talk about different ways to use blogs in ESL classes, and show people how easy it is to create a blog for themselves or for their class.

My goals for my own professional blogging development include
1. learning to audioblog! (soon!)
2. learning to videoblog? (eventually)
3. familiarizing myself with some other blog hosts, like wordpress.com.

Finally, a thought which came to me just today: why not try to set up some "blog buddies" among the webheads, so that rather than haphazardly trying to help everyone out by sporadically visiting and commenting on their/their students' blogs, each of us could adopt one or more other teachers interested in blogging and make a point of visiting and commenting on their class blogs or student blogs on a more regular basis? I think I will post a note to that effect on the Yahoo!Groups message board and see what happens.