Before taking my ETPT class, I had never used a blog for any reason. Although we only use ours to answer thoughtful questions about technology and education, I feel that blogs can be used in many different ways. They can be a place where students collaborate their ideas about a topic, write answers to essay questions for a class, or even read the teacher's thoughts or explanations about topics. After watching the video Why Let Our Students Blog? by Rachel Boyd and reading the information on "Objectives and Guidelines for Safe and Responsible Blogging", I feel that blogs can be a useful and effective tool, and there is a good chance that I will use them in my classroom.
For Spanish Education, I can use blogs to give students a reason to type their Spanish sentences on a computer rather than write them on paper. This is important because with today's use of technology, students will more than likely use a computer to communicate rather than writing things down. By having to type their answers in a blog, students will learn how to type using the Spanish keyboard, which can sometimes be confusing. Along with this, students will have to read and comment on others' blogs, which will expose them to more Spanish and they will get practice reading and understanding other student's Spanish at the same level, rather than the teacher's. This can be highly effective in comprehension and reading skills for my Spanish classroom. No matter what grade level I teach, I feel that I will use blogs in my classroom to hone on the skills we learn in class and complete them in a blog format.
I agree that the Spanish lessons can be helped with blogging! But you might also want to consider that you could possibly network with other teachers in Spanish speaking countries and have them learn to carry on actual conversations with Spanish speaking students.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that a Spanish blog would help students learn how to read and write in Spanish substantially. I also did not use a blog really before this class and feel that it is a helpful tool that allows students to engage in collaboration and deeper thoughts about topics prompted towards them.
ReplyDeleteI had never used blogging before this class either and I think it really is a great way to help students discuss topics and learn new information. I think that the idea about using a Spanish blog in your classroom would be a great plan to have. It would help students learn the material in a more non-conventional way.
ReplyDeleteYou have some very nice ideas as to using blogging for your teaching. I had several friends back in Greece that were already using blogs to share ideas, journals and stories they wrote and I found that impressive. I believe that blogging can encourage literacy skills a great deal. It is a well known fact I think, that in order to encourage and promote student writing, you have to create an audience, the process of publishing makes people feel more responsible about the way they will express themselves. I too am looking for ways to incorporate blogging into the curriculum.
ReplyDeleteI think that you made a great point of using the blog to do things in your classroom. There were many times in my high school Spanish classes that the same people would talk while everyone else sat silently in the classroom. I think a blog would definitely help a lot to get practice with a language in a conversation format.
ReplyDeleteUnlike you I did use a blog one other time in school and it was actually for my spanish class. From the student point of view I loved it and really learned a lot from it. It allowed me to practice my grammar and also simply talking well in this case writing about real life situations. Along with this I also was able to practice my abilities to read spanish because we were required to respond to other peoples blogs as well as our own. I think you will benefit and be able to very easily track students understanding of a topic through blogs
ReplyDeleteI didn't use blogging before this class either. I am finding it to be fun and helpful. It's great that you can use bloggig to help teach Spanish, I never thought of the web and typing in a blog as a tool for kids to help expand their foreign language skills, good idea!
ReplyDeleteI also didnt really evewr use a blog before this class either, and i always thought of them as ineffective. I liked how you used points for being a spanish teacher. I liked all the ways you were going to implement blogs in the classroom!!
ReplyDeleteI also never used blogging before. I love your idea to have your spanish students use blogs!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on how useful blogging could be in teaching foreign languages, myself wanting to teach English as a second language in South Korea. The blogs are also helpful, I believe, because when students write on tests or for class assignments they are really focusing on sentence structure, and the words can sometimes feel very robotic. By having them write their own thoughts in a blog, I think it will help students develop a voice when speaking another language.
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