Monday, 18 January 2010

Getting your students involved in the Read/Write Web

At MELTA we have a workshop coming up on 27 February 2010 with Karenne Sylvester, who has been teaching blended learning courses using Ning, a social networking cum online course creation tool. She's started an online series on how to learn English on her blog. Her first post is on how she gets her students reading blogs, and includes the blogs she recommends to her students, and they include my favorites and introduced me to some new ones, especially Dominic Cole's, a blogger who keeps up not one but three very interesting blogs. Really cool. This is Karenne's list:
  1. Dominic Cole's: http://alittlebutoften.blogspot.com/
  2. Toby Crawley's: http://bite-sized-english.com/
  3. Markus Brendell: http://www.der-englisch-blog.de/
  4. Neal Chambers': http://www.englishspark.com/en/blogs
  5. Berni Wall's: http://www.gapfillers.co.uk/
  6. Nik Peachey's : http://daily-english-activities.blogspot.com/
  7. Jeffrey Hill's: http://jeffreyhill.typepad.com/english/
  8. Clare Whitmell's: http://www.theenglishweb.com/
  9. Chiew P Nang's: http://acliltoclimb.blogspot.com/
  10. Sue Lyon Jones': http://esolcourses.blogspot.com/
  11. Anne Hodgson's (yeah! thanks!): http://annehodgson.de/
I'd add Dominic Cole's main blog: http://www.dcielts.com/archive/
Karenne will be starting up her own blog for learners again, too.

And what about the Business Spotlight and Spotlight crowd, who write real blogs, and nice ones, too, but for a magazine? For some reason the blogging world hasn't accepted them as one of their own. I'm not sure why that is. Is it unacceptable to recommend a magazine blog? Or is it that they're not engaging on Twitter, or commenting on other people's blogs? I figure that might be a faux pas in the blogging community. Yet the blogs are clearly directed at a language learner, and are explicitly educational. I don't think that's a bad thing.
  1. Debbie Capras's: http://www.business-spotlight.de/blogs/deborah-capras/
  2. Ian McMaster's: http://www.business-spotlight.de/blogs/ian-mcmaster/
  3. Eamonn Fitzgerald's: http://www.spotlight-online.de/blogs/eamonn-fitzgerald/
  4. Dagmar Taylor's: http://www.spotlight-online.de/blogs/dagmar-taylor
  5. Mike Pilewski's: http://www.spotlight-online.de/blogs/mike-pilewski
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4 comments:

KALINAGO ENGLISH said...

Hey ya Anne... I figure no one else will say this so I'm going to go ahead, especially based on the fact that my students and I real-life tested the Business Spotlight blogs.

1. They're too hard.

2. They're not funny.

The two biggest faves (from my students perepectives) are Neal and Toby's - simple humour, short posts, not too many new words.

Sincerely hope that information is useful.

On the other hand you also asked about why the blogopshere hasn't taken these bloggers on and it goes with, in part the discussion you're also having on Island Weekly...

The blogosphere is a community and made up of members - it simply doesn't work like books you buy in the bookstore or magazines at the newstand. It's 2.0, a conversation.

There's no point being in it, if you ain't in it. ;-)

Karenne

Karenne

18 January 2010 at 19:19
Anne Hodgson said...

I hear you loud and clear :)

19 January 2010 at 01:28
Anne Hodgson said...

Have your students not discovered Dagmar's blog? Probably the funniest one out there.

19 January 2010 at 12:08
KALINAGO ENGLISH said...

No - what's /where's Dagmar's blog? Will you leave the url on my page about student blogs so I can add it?

Ta,
K

27 January 2010 at 10:37

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