50 word mini-saga

What I like about my teaching is that my students are young adult boys and girls of teaching specialities, I can help them to interact and build up relationships inside the group but when it comes to projects on their specialties they teach me, so we collaborate and enjoy it.

Reflections on blogging

Last year I started blogging with my students and I enjoyed it. First, it helped me with organizing. Students do not always hand in their work in time, it can be lost, mixed with papers from other groups. In a blog you can easily see who, how many, when, what tasks were done. They are safe, you can’t lose them, and even those who are absent can contribute and ‘hand in’ their works. Second, it is their motivation that everyone could see their work, it will be read and commented. Besides, it’s additional reading of each others posts. I agree with Carla Arena that blogging builds up a sense of community, and blogs encourage many shy students to express themselves. The main problem is that still not everybody has free access to the internet and some students are lazy to type and still prefer to write on a sheet of paper somewhere during a break. I asked students to post short articles on the topic we study, use special lexical items in stories, comment. I liked the examples of C. Arena’s tasks to promote more interaction: “I’ve had reading projects in which the students read short stories in parts and for each part there was a post that led students towards reflection. Another great activity that sparks students’ curiosity is to invite a mystery guest as a contributor to your class blog, and have the learners interact with this mystery guest to find out who he is, where he’s from and so on. Or how about an international exchange in which two groups from different countries interact, talk about all kinds of subjects and use their English in an authentic setting, to promote communication for a real purpose?” I think about developing a reading task: post a short story with a task for students – continue, write another ending, answer opinion questions. My students’ blog http://group51blog.blogspot.com/

Reflections on word processing and collaborative writing tools in EFL

I have never used collaborative writing tools before, I even was unaware of them. So now it is my first try.I have not thought about using word processing in a class and these activities are new for me. Some of them are not necessary for my students as I work at a technical university and there is no need to teach them word processing, in fact, they know computer much better than I. But I found some tasks that I can adapt with my students- these are narrative and descriptive writing, different types of letters ( Vance Stevens). In general I think grammar and vocabulary exercises together with word processing are interesting for young school children and can replace traditional workbooks.For example, I jumble up words in sentences or sentences in paragraphs. Or order of instructions. Or paragraphs within an essay. And then ask students to unjumble these, again using dragging or cutting or pasting.» I think this an interesting task that would very well work with my studentsAs far as word processing tools for collaborative writing are concerned I think they are wonderful for project works. We do with students project works when they study a topic in small groups, write together a summary and present to the whole group. Such work can be organized with Google Docs (for example). First, students may generate ideas, share them, make a plan, then write each point of the plan simultaneously without need to type, compare in class, retype. I think about another way to use it in my class. When we get ready to FCE there is a task to describe a picture and comment your partner description. For more practice and more accurate speech it can be a home writing task. I need to divide the group into pairs, post a picture for them to describe and comment collaboratively. Other colleagues opinions are here.