Blogging towards autonomy

This afternoon I gave the workshop on blogging. Autonomy was indeed required while participants struggled to open their accounts on WordPress.com. There were too many people signing in so I suppose the server could not process all requests at the same time. It was also very difficult to hear the two podcasts, one made by Michael Coghlan and the other by Aiden Yeh as the connection was a bit slow and the sound was delivered in chopped packets. The session on RSS was postponed for tomorrow.

I hope you can listen to them in your spare time or when you are back home because they are really worth it and give you a good idea of what can be done with this techology.

Some examples of blogs that were shared during the presentation, in case you want to revisit them are:

Dekita.org – a project that highlights blogging projects and students’ publishing work and helps you find other blogging classes around the world.

The Mie Journal – a group weblog created by undergraduate students at Mie University, Japan, as part of an EFL course.

6eme05 (elementary students)

Some others you can check are:

Beeonline – intermediate students interacting with mystery guest

A student’s blog

I encourage those who did not manage to open the account during the session to persevere, contact me if you have any doubts and send me your URL (address) as soon as you get it. Do not forget to place yourselves on the HSS map.

At the end of the session we moved to the ELT open chat moderated by Julian Wing in Rio de Janeiro. From there some took off into virtual space to voice chat on Yahoo Messenger with some of the webheads invited for the event. Although there was not much time to talk to each one and find out more about the work they have been developing with blogs and other tools, you are warmly invited to join the Electronic Village Online sessions starting next weeek. The sessions are free and open to all interested parties and you do not need to be a Tesol member to participate.

I especially recommend the Becoming a Webhead workshop for all those who want to have an overview on how to use different communication tools in their teaching and join a warm and supporting international community of teachers interested in learning more and developing professionally. Collaborative blogging will provide you with more practice in what you have started here.

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