Blogging is easy, it is cheap! It is everywhere and you can do almost anything with space on a blog.
I am a blogger.com user - I find it the easiest to set up, and post visuals, audio and video files, and easy to navigate and to create simple, attractive pages to go about posting lesson samples and activity ideas.
To become a blogger you need an e-mail account. For www.blogger.com you will need a g-mail account. Very simple and easy to set up.
I do suggest you try to have a few steps of your blog content in place, even on an old piece of paper (yes! I still use them) or in a word document. The word doc will help you have a base to work from, when you cut and paste ideas and content from one place to another. here some steps I suggest you think about:
- Welcome page - Think of and begin with a simple couple of pages blogs to host a lesson you want to teach and engage your students in. Let's say: greetings.
- Write down some key ideas around greetings your want to share. See mine below. (use a word doc for this)
- Basic vocabulary page - Some fundamental structures: sample greetings and times of day as well as people they can be said to. (write them in text on the blog, add audio pal files for audio practice; use a voki or two if you like)
- Model Page - Some mini-dialogues where you create text or link to text that show and model the greetings. (seek links with sample dialogues already made; or make audio files with a voki or audio pal; see if there are clips of videos about greetings)
- Practice Page - Some recognition and practice activities (matching exercises, some completion of sentences, some simple practice tests.
- Culture Page - consider searching and posting some notes about cultural ideas related to greetings. There are a lot of online resources and videos around this in many languages. Use the samples in your blog page.
- Storybook page - create a simple book and post the link on the page - use audio pal to accompany the book with audio examples - for reading practice.
- Final Task Page - set up a task that you can ask your students to work on based on the greetings information and new skills they have gained. They could prepare small vokis that they can send to you and you can collect them all and post them on your blog.
Just a few things to remember about blogs:
- The entries (posts) are saved in chronological order - so the one your create first should be the one you want students to go last - I use a link tool in my blogs to overcome this problem and make sequences for my visitors.
- You cannot post direct files on blogs - use a wiki space and link to that for files you need your visitors to use for the activities.
Have fun!
Visit my story blogs and content in SL blogs below:
