A shared course blog

I have noticed that many teachers use blogs for student portfolio work. Each student creates his or her own blog, posts the required tasks and the link list is somehow shared. I have always used a course blog instead and let me tell you why.

Wordpress allows the blog administrator to invite users. These users can be given either an administrator, editor or author status which gives them certain privileges. The teacher can build the environment for her students with embedded videos, links and photos to make instructions livelier. After signing up as Wordpress users, students are then invited via e-mail to join the course blog.

Advantages of using one blog together with students

• a shared interactive web environment (less links and traffic from one website to another)
  
• spontaneous discussions via commenting
• some censorship control by the teacher (bullying, inappropriate blog posts, spam)
• teacher assessment is easier (updates from one blog)
  
• students cooperate with each other to construct the blog together
• students see everyone's work and the teacher's comments in one place
• peer evaluation is easier
• the administrator can edit any blog post to help writers with technical or grammatical challenges
• a sense of togetherness = a collective experience
  

Disadvantages of a course blog

• students have limited control over the general visual appearance (theme, widgets)
• student autonomy is somewhat compromised
• lots of text to read (students can get frustrated)
• if the layout is not simple enough, posts may be hard to find

I have been using shared course blogs for three years now and I have almost 50 blogs by now, all easily accessible under one username. I highly recommend this to all the teachers out there! For a list of blogs that I have created together with my students, please visit Espoo Heart English!

Amazing Anvill

There is a new national course in Finnish upper secondary school, English Oral Skills, which will soon be a mandatory part of the standardized matriculation examination tests. I am amazed at the new discovery that I made this week, ANVILL, and convinced that this particular course would greatly benefit from such a web environment.

ANVILL (A National Virtual Language Lab) is a speech-based toolbox for language teachers, focused on the practice of oral/aural language. ANVILL has very modern web-based audio and video tools from duber dot com and the University of Oregon: Voiceboards, LiveChat, and Quizzes and Surveys. TCast, allows teachers to record and place audio or video files anywhere in a lesson in 3 easy steps. Each of these tools really opens up the scope and sequence of lessons centered around spoken language tasks.


Animoto is another new web tool that I am going to use with my oral English course, luckily it can be easily embedded into ANVILL. Fun, 30-second videos!