Responses to blogs 3/20

Which blogs did you review?
The first blog I reviewed was Have Fun with English.
I was quite amazed by this blog. I kept wondering, "How much time do you take to put something like this together?" I wondered if teachers in Portugal, like teachers in France, spend less face to face time with students than do teachers in America, so they have more time to be creative.

What did you learn about the author?
I learned that the author of the blog is a teacher of middle school English students in Portugal. Her name is Teresa.Her blogger name is Teresadeca. She lived overseas when she was young (several years in the United States.) She is a great lover of the U.S.A. and things American. She has been teaching for over twenty years.

What sort of topics do they cover? What use do these blogs seem to serve?
The blog allows her to keep in contact with her students and for them to use English for real communication purposes.
It also allows her to put up lessons for CALL (which I found out is Computer Assisted Language Learning.) It seemed as though students spent part of their ninety minute period using computers for CALL. I'd seen one of the programs "Quia" before as I was looking for things to do with my Reading students.
She also lists friends (contacts.) I'm not sure how this works, being a total neophyte at anything outside e-mail.
How do you podcast?

What purpose might they serve for your students?
One way I could use blogs would be to have students blog about the latest book they have read. I have my students keep a journal of their reading, and could not really do that as a blog (not enough computers.) However, they finish books at different times, so they could write about their books then. Or they could blog about books on days when they really wanted to. Every week I have students "Say Something", where they talk with another student about what they are reading, but here they would be able to reach more students.

Second blog
Borderland
This blog was very different. It takes what I would call a philosophically leftist bent. I mean he talks about Ivan Illich. The author is an Alaskan elementary teacher of 23 years. He has a degree in literacy. His philosophy is that teaching should open students' minds. Even without going far into the blog, it was clear that he was not a fan of the standardized curriculum. The blog is a mixture of the personal (his photos) and the professional.
I particularly liked these two quotations:

"My beliefs and practices are out of alignment."
and
This Zen quote seems important lately: “Great doubt, great enlightenment. Little doubt, little enlightenment. No doubt, no enlightenment.”

What sort of topics do they seem to cover?What use do these blogs seem to serve?
This blog is very political. For example, he has a letter that he wrote to his senator against the DOPA (a bill to restrict access to media online for students to constrain the activities of online predators.) He also has a tirade against Dibels ( I thought of Pat when I read it.) which creates quite a conversation on-line. I found it really interesting, but I could have spent hours going off on different links and I honestly didn't have hours, so I really just dipped my beak in.
He blogs about the history of reading comprehension, freedom in society, etc. etc. It seems to be a place for philosophical musing on teaching. If I were in the mood and had the time for musing, I would turn to this blog.
He also has links to lots of interesting to reading resources. I'd like to spend some time looking at his links.
He also has links to "other lands" or other blogs.

What purpose might it serve for your students?
I didn't see anything like the student orientation in the first blog. He did have a link to a classroom blog called Tell the Raven, which looked interesting. It's more for teachers to get ideas.

I like this blogger's sense of humor. I hated the fact that he used it's when he meant its. That's the sort of thing that drives me crazy, and I don't understand why an intelligent person can't get a simple concept in punctuation.

Anyway, that's all for tonight. The thing about this technology is that you can simply be pulled in and keep going deeper, but you haven't spent a lot of time at any single level, so in the end it can be rather disappointing. It's a problem I have with the huge amount of information that is now available. Overload! Where to stop? Why the compulsion to keep on surfing?