WEEK 1: Using Blogs in Language Teaching

I am not so new to using blogs with students as I used it for different purposes before. While I was working at a prep program, I used blog software as a tool to support in-class writing instruction. I am deliberately using "blog software" because what we did was not blogging in its real sense but just making use of the software to share students' writing assignments. I was teaching writing skill in accordance with the principles of process approach: As you know, process approach emphasizes recursive nature of writing skill, the need to guide the students through the stages such as planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing (Hyland, 2003). It also underlines the concepts of audience, purpose and interaction with peers and the instructor. However, it was not so easy to provide an effective writing instruction since the course hour (face-to-face meeting) was very limited. So, using blogging provided us with a wonderful solution to the time-limit problem.
I used the class blog and learner blogs as described in Campbell, 2003. First of all, I created a class blog which was used to inform students about the things to do (assignment, giving feedback to peers, activities to be done etc...). Then I required the students to create their own blogs (learner blogs) to share their writings with the class. During the in-class instruction, I was teaching the topic of the week, showing them some model paragraphs/essays, doing some structure related exercises with them, and all the other stages of writing process were being carried out on the students' blog pages. They wrote the first draft of their assignments on their pages. Then I waited for the students to comment on each other's works. After they got feedback from their friends, I myself read and gave feedback to their writings. For the surface level feedback/correction, I used some colour codes each indicating different types of mistake; for the content-level feedback I used the comment option of blogging as well. Depending on the peer and teacher feedback, the students wrote their subsequent drafts. We did the same things for each topic covered throughout the term.
The short version of the story is that using blog, first of all, increased the time we spend with students; it increased the teacher-student interaction. And most of my students reported that using blogs also contributed to the social atmosphere of their classroom. An interesting thing we experienced during this study was that the students got "real audience" to their writings in addition to their classmates. I strongly believe that this added to their motivation. Even, several of my students said that they felt themselves as if they were column writers in a newspaper, which I found very amazing. To me it was a very pleasant and beneficial experience...
Campbell, A. P. (2003). Weblogs for Use with ESL Classes. The Internet TESL Journal. 9 (2).
Hyland, K. (2003). Second Language Writing. UK: Cambridge University Press