The purpose of this project is to present a proposal in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) are involved in the field of language teaching. A class blog was chosen and designed on Blogger to be used as a web tool where students from the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas (IVIC) will post their tasks/activities and practice and learn English.
Our weekly topic this time was bloggin. You might be wondering what a blog is. Well, a blog (abbreviated from weblog) is often described as an online journal but blogs can also be better described as "web sites that are easily created and updated by those with even a minimum of technology know-how"(1). In other words, blogs are like online diaries.
For educational purposes blogs are an excellent tool teachers should use in their classrooms. Any post (topic published) can become a discussion and that is why participation is key in this process of knowledge exchange. As language teachers we have many possibilities when using blogs for and in our classes. We post our perspective of a topic, or a reading exercise, or just a simple question regarding the language we teach, and then students participate actively in the discussion of that post and that's how relationships and collaborative work are built.
In the field of Language Teaching, Aaron Campbell (2003) has outlined three types of blogs: the tutor blog, the class blog, and the learner blog (2). Each of these three types of blog can be used in language classes to provide students with the ideal space to share their thoughts, comments, knowledge, and discuss topics related to language learning.
Blogs are also a way to create different communities of bloggers (people that blog) and contact other teachers and students that do the same thing we do and have common interests. In simple words: blogs give people the power of the media, in this particular case the power of education and teaching. It'll depend on us to use it properly for the right purpose.
And you, what would you do with this power?
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Check this video that shows, in a simple and illustrative way, this great tool.
I am a Translator and Interpreter (Spanish-English-Italian) graduated from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and since 2008 I have been working as an English teacher in the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones CientÃficas (IVIC).
Currently, I am doing postgraduate studies to obtain a Master´s Degree in the teaching of EFL (English as a Foreign Language).
