We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.
Vladimir Nabokov
The
World Wide Web is a valuable source of information that can be and must be used
by both teachers and students inside and outside the classroom to foster the
professional growth. Nowadays billions of people work, chat, write, explore,
google, search, blog, twitter, subscribe, comment, post, upload, download,
network, publish, and do many other things spending from 2 to 10 hours a day on
the internet. English as being lingua franca is indisputably the mostly used
language of the internet. We, the teachers of English, should take profit of
this fact and introduce web technologies in curriculum and teach our students
how to use web technologies to enhance our students’ learning skills.
In
the present article I am going to focus on the writing skills, as writing
essays, reports, mini compositions, and text analyses is an indivisible part of
the any curriculum. Mostly students’ writings are very different with a good or
bad grammar, but touching, sad, well-written, however, these are their
masterpieces that are honest and deep, that develop their personal style, and
sometimes you understand who has written it without reading the name of the
students, thus their writing style becomes unique. Many times I catch myself
thinking that it would be great to show students’ works to someone else. I
found out about a wonderful possibility to demonstrate students’ writings to
the whole world by creating Class Blogs, while participating in the e-learning
program ”Building Teaching Skills Through the Interactive Web”, organized by
the University of Oregon. Blogging is a marvelous way to efficiently organize
students’ independent work and share their writings, motivating them to be
creative as they become genuine writers, thus their works won’t be stocked in
some drawers, and be forgotten forever. There are so many benefits of this type
of writing. Thirst of all, I get students’ writing via email, in this way I
solve the first problem – students’ hand writing, unfortunately sometimes it
takes more time to understand it, and I lose head and tail of the general
message. Secondly, before creating the blog it is necessary to inform students
about the types, forms and consequences of plagiarizing, teach them how to
avoid plagiarizing and tell them about footnotes, parenthetical references, and
bibliography, how to paraphrase and summarize the studied material. Third of
all, students develop their unique style and become more creative, the fact
that they will have a huge international audience motivates students a lot and
they show their real potential, besides they communicate with people from
different countries, as it is a good manner to reply to the comments left by
the readers.
However,
in order to start implementing web technologies in the classroom it is
necessary to find out about the possibilities of students, if they have
computers and internet connection in their residence places. When I started
investigating this question the results did not surprise me at all as the
present generation of students has computers, laptops, and ipads at home. They
are active members of social networks, who surf the net reading the news,
listening to the music, using Skype instead of the telephones, consulting online
dictionaries, reading e-books, corresponding via mail, networking, using
personal blogs, How to? Blogs, online TV, Youtube. The list is really
impressive. The
students who live in the university campus have Wi-Fi internet connection in the
university hostels. So, students have possibilities to apply web technologies
into practice.
To start blogging, it is needed to inform students about the benefits and opportunities that are opened if writing a blog. And here again web technologies are of great help. To help my students with this I used webquest. According to webquest.org, “A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web.” I created the webquest entitled “To Blog!”, on zunal.com, to introduce my students into blogging, make them investigate this notion themselves and find answers to 3 questions “What is blogging? What are the types of blogging? What are the rules of a successful blog?” As the final product of the investigation students were to make Power Point Presentations to share the things that they have learned in the classroom.
As the experience shows, being informed is being enarmed, the power of knowledge helps to make the next step – create a Class Blog. Deborah Healey, e-teacher from the University of Oregon, has written a perfect guide for all beginners. It is entitled “Creating a Blog at Blogger.com”. I didn’t hesitate to use this marvelous opportunity and my two groups of students and I have opened our account on Google and created our Class Blogs to have a wider audience for our writings. We entitled them ClassBlog261, and ClassBlog262 . The students were given one week to post their introductions, where I asked them to present themselves, their group, their language experience, hobbies and write a motto that would represent them. In general the introductory posts were very different and very similar at the same time. Some students uploaded their photographs or the photographs of their pets to make the presentation more attractive. Working and posting on the Class Blog culminated in individual students’ posts. The groups under consideration have become more responsible and engaged in new activities. The role of the writers, not mere readers inspired the students to manifest themselves from very positive and promising perspective. They became more independent and open to the world. The new technologies used during the classes of Applied English have a big impact on both me and my students. The most important thing is that we have changed and we are ready to explore new technology tools in continuation. I was delighted to see that my students became more active and flexible during the lessons. The group attendance has grown.
By
all means students should be informed about the ground rules for discussions,
as all posts and comments should be respectful, clear and correct from
grammatical point of view. It is highly recommended to give the students
necessary instructions that would help them avoid unpleasant communication.
A
journey of thousand miles begins with a single step. Sometimes the first step
is the most difficult, but it should be done. It takes time to learn, as teaching
as well as learning is the life-long process, but we, teachers, should inform
our students about web technologies, encourage them use new technologies in the
class and in individual work to enhance their writing skills, and introduce
them in the modern classroom through curriculum.
Bibliography:
- Jarek Krajka "Using the Internet in ESL Writing Instruction"
- “AssessingLearning Alternative Assessment”
- Susan Gaer “Less Teaching and More Learning”
- “TeachingLarge Classes”
- “Top Ten Slide Tips”
- “Presentingwith PowerPoint”
- http://classblog261.blogspot.com/
- http://classblog262.blogspot.com/
- Deborah Healey “Creating a Blog at Blogger.com”“Creating a Blog at Blogger.com”
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