In this series, Nicky Hockly explains aspects of technology which some people may be embarrassed to confess that they don’t really understand. In this article, she looks at blogs and how they might be relevant to language teaching.
1. What exactly is a blog?
Blogs have been around since the late 1980s – they were one of the earliest and easiest ways to get published on the internet, and they are still an extremely popular tool for self-publishing. Blog is short for web log, and is an online journal of sorts, usually kept by individuals, and regularly updated with ‘posts’ which appear on a webpage in reverse chronological order (so with the latest post at the top of the page). Blogs have spawned a wealth of very nice blog related words, such as blogger (the person who blogs), the blogosphere (the collection of blogs and bloggers worldwide), blogroll (your list of favourite blogs, linked to from your own blog) and blog-fade (when one gets tired of one’s own blog). Blogs can be kept on almost any topic you care to mention, and you’ll find blogs on politics, art, people’s personal lives, travel, and so on. There are also many blogs related to teachers and teaching.
2. How can I use blogs in my teaching?
Although blogs, like the internet itself, have been called ‘vanity publishing gone mad’, there are several types of blogs you can use in your teaching; blogs used in education are known as edublogs. You can set up your own blog for your learners to read, in which you provide them with summaries of lessons, extra links and homework, for example – this is a teacher blog. You can also set up one blog for an entire class to contribute to – a class blog. You can have a class blog in which students report on books that they are reading out of class, for example, or to which they contribute short written pieces on a certain topic. Another option is for each of your learners to have their own blog – a student blog. One of the nice features of blogs, which helps make them more interactive, is the ‘comment’ function, by which learners can leave comments on each other’s blog posts.
3. So a blog is best for writing practice?
Blogs certainly lend themselves well to short pieces of writing, but you can also add pictures and embed videos into blog posts, which can make for a much richer visual and multi-media experience. You can also integrate all sort of ‘widgets’ (or little gadgets) into your blog, such as a Twitter feed (see ETp Issue 60), mouseover translation tools (if you point your mouse at a word, you are supplied with a translation) and a calendar, and you could also have a class blogroll in a sidebar. Blogs can also be used for reading practice. You can easily find alreadypublished blogs on topics of interest for your learners to subscribe to and read.
4. How can I ‘subscribe’ to a blog?
There is a clever little application called RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication), which allows you to subscribe to blogs online. Let’s imagine that you want to read and follow five blogs regularly. Instead of going along to each of those five blogs every day to see if anything new has been posted, you can use an RSS reader or ‘feed’, which goes along to the blog page for you, and if there is a new post, it automatically lists the new blog post in your RSS reader on your computer screen. This can save you a lot of time, as there is no need for you to go along to each individual blog page – the information comes straight to you. You can either download and install an RSS reader on your computer (for example, Sharp Reader), or you can use an online RSS reader (like Google Reader). The advantage of using an online RSS reader is that you can access it from any computer, whereas a downloaded RSS reader sits on the computer you have installed it on, and can only be accessed on that computer.
5. I’d love to write my own blog. How do I get started?
The easiest way into blogging is to set up a personal blog for yourself, for example about a recent interesting holiday or trip, or a blog about yourself, your family and your interests and hobbies. This gives purpose to your blog, and you can share photos and experiences with family and friends – and then later with your students! Setting up your own blog helps you to learn to use the software; Blogger (www.blogger.com) is one of the easiest and most intuitive free blog sites to use. Once you’ve figured out how to post to your own blog, how to add photos, and – if you’re feeling adventurous – how to embed a video, you’ll be ready to set up a class blog, or to help your students set up their own individual student blogs. There are many examples of blogs by English teachers and students around the world, and you’ll find a list of selected resources, free blogging tools and EFL-related sample blogs at www.theconsultants-e.com/courses/ blogs/resources.asp.
Nicky Hockly has been involved in EFL teaching and teacher training since 1987. She is Director of Pedagogy of The Consultants-E, an online training and development consultancy. Nicky is co-author of How to Teach English with Technology, published by Longman, which won the 2007 Ben Warren Prize.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 63, 2009
