Blogs and education

New ideas about blogs

What I’ve pulled for you today are blogs divided by subject and grade level for you to quickly reference, but I do encourage you to explore blogs outside of your curriculum, as well. Some are classroom blogs. Others are teacher reflections. A few are teaching strategies with classroom resources, and there are even some from outside education, but relate to your curriculum.

I cannot guarantee you will be able to reference all of these blogs while at school, as I am aware many school filters limit access to blogs. Please, do not let that discourage you from investigating, however. Take the time to check these out. Hopefully you will find inspiration and wonderful ideas.

If you own a blog or know of another one that would fall under this list, please consider adding it to the comments. The better the list, the better we all will benefit.


Technology Integration
•A Whole New Dianne – A Tech Link Sharing Blog
•Cliotech
•Cool Cat Teacher

•Farr-Out Links to Learning

•Free Tech for Teachers
•Future Education Tech
•iSuffers – Students Ready for the Future
•Jane’s eLearning Pick of the Day
•Kathy Schrock Kaffeeklatsch

•Langwitches

Blogging in Elementary Schools

Here are three examples of teachers that use blogging in their classes

Mrs. Cassidy’s Classroom Blog
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=1337

Mrs. D’s 2^nd Grade Blog
http://mrsd.tblog.com/

Ms. Griffins’s 3^rd Grade GT Class
http://mgriffith.wordpress.com/

Blogs and teachers

Here you can start knowing about the concepts of edublogs, blogs created by teachers or related to education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edublog

You can also create your own edublog here, it has a lot of tools that teachers may need http://edublogs.org/

There is also a community where teachers post their experiences, activities and more http://teacherlingo.com/

Finally a video about using blogs for educational purposes
http://youtu.be/NRyh4UeP-IY

Communicative Exercises

What is language for?

Language is one of the many forms of communication we can use, one of the ways in which we inform people about what is going on inside us , when we say 'I am hungry' or ' my heart is broken ' we are expressing things that sometimes we can't see but only hear about.

However, language is about concepts and ideas - it's not about the use of the subjunctive. Learning a foreign language should be fun. We want to learn a new language because we want to communicate, to interchange knowledge and all kinds of ideas. This is why one of the best approches to language learning is the coomunicative approach.

Here's an example called "Eavesdropping". It is a very popular communicative exercise and it is aimed at advanced students.

Listen to a conversation somewhere in a public place and be prepared to answer, in the target language, some general questions about what was said.

1. Who was talking?

2. About how old were they?

3. Where were they?

4. What were they talking about?

5. What did they say?

6. Did they become aware that you were listening to them?

The exercise puts students in a real-world listening situation where they must report information overheard. Most likely they have an opinion of the topic, and a class discussion could follow, in the target language, about their experiences and viewpoints.

Here's another exercise: The teacher shows the students a video such as from 0:50 to 2:10, then the classroom is divided into two or three groups, the teacher will act as a moderator and will give ideas to start discussing the video such as: what issues or problems are presented in the video? when are they going to be solved? if you were president what would you do to solve them?

Finally, games and activities are also a nice way to improve communicative skills. Here's a forum where you can find many activities that can be used inside the clasroom English games and activities

What do you think about the communicative approach? Have you used it?