Creative writing with flowers

Say it with flowers...

Here's a creative writing exercise I liked, by Mario Rinvolucri, which I found in the latest issue of Humanising Language Teaching, online at hltmag.co.uk.

Suggested procedure:

• Bring a vase and 5 flowers into class
• Ask for a student volunteer to arrange the flowers in the vase
• Then say: "These flowers are a family. Please write three paragraphs about the family".

Unless you have a super creative class, used to such exercises, you might want to have a pre-writing stage in which, either whole class or in pairs/threes, you get the students to talk about the family first. If they bounce ideas off each other, the writing will be easier.

Don't forget to take a photo of the flowers, as they won't last as long as your text!

Summer camp flowers
The flowers in the photo, above, were cut out from egg cartons and painted. If you were on a summer camp, you could get your learners to each make their own flower, and start from there...

Blogging flowers
If you have a class blog, I'd suggest that this is the sort of activity you want to post on it. It's fun, it's creative, and it's more motivating knowing that the work is going to be posted somewhere, and kept...

Task #4: A blogging project

We're going to use the "comments" to this post (below) to brainstorm a list of the 25 greatest rock albums of all time. With a partner, agree on one that should be on the list, name it in the comments, and add up to 25 words justifying your choice.

If you disagree with an album someone else has suggested, say so (in a separate comment).

Don't forget that you should also create a comment to record what you think of the task.

More ideas for blogging projects, webquests

A couple of very recent news stories that might make good blogging projects and/or webquests...

I'm assuming that you have a class blog with a group of adults, on which all your students can "author" posts (write, and not just comment, that is), though if you only allow your students to comment, the first at least would still work well.

1. Virtual fashion
In Britain and France, "the world's first virtual fashion game" Miss Bimbo has been a huge success with young girls (it's addressed to 9-16 year olds), allowing them to create a virtual self and earn "bimbo dollars" to give themselves plastic surgery etc. Needless to say it has sparked controversy -- and it's the controversy that I think would make it an idea that would work in class: your learners will want to talk about it, find out more, etc.

2. The worst food in the USA
The New York Times has a book review that lists the worst foods in America, based on their fat content, calories, etc (like the Chocolate Chip Paradise Pie with Vanilla Ice Cream, with a mere 1,600 calories). The article gives you a starting point for discussion and though they might not be able to find out all of the actual details, calorie counts, etc, researching "the worst foods in Spain" (or wherever), or "the worst fast food", might make a good project.

3. Plastic rubbish on the beach
The BBC's environment correspondent David Shukman has a report on the threat of plastic rubbish drifting in the ocean, which might make an interesting project particularly if you are teaching a content-based curriculum (or have just got to the "Environment" unit in your coursebook!), and particularly if you teach somewhere close to the beach. You might not be somewhere as dramatic as Mr Shukman gets to (the historic Pacific island of Midway), but you might try to persuade your learners (for homework!) to go down to the beach, see what rubbish they can find and report back (via their blog, that is).

Homemade webquests
If you wanted to turn these ideas into webquests, I'd talk about the stories first and see what sort of unanswered questions class discussion produced -- as I much prefer my learners to generate their own questions, their own webquest, rather than one I impose on them.

Alternative technologies
If you don't have a blog, you could still do all of the above, and could produce PowerPoint presentations or things to display on your classroom walls.

Video: How to start a blog with Blogger

YouTube video: How to set up a blog with Blogger

Don't remember where I found this one -- an "official" video on YouTube showing you how-to set up a blog on Blogger. Believe me: it really is that easy.

Here's the link provided at the end of the video for more information (Blogger's excellent "Help" section)

On YouTube, you'll find lots of other "How to's" for Blogger.

Here on this blog we have a step-by-step set-up guide if you find the video hard to follow...

Blogging, Storytelling, Video links

Two great sets of links, both of which came from recent additions to Larry Ferlazzo's amazing collection of links:

• Using Blogs to Promote Authentic Learning in the Classroom
• Digital Storytelling

Note also this link, which I discovered by exploring from the second of the above:

• Video in the classroom

How should you use technology in the classroom? Your learners should create things with it. It shouldn't just be you finding and printing stuff for them, or displaying it to them on an interactive whiteboard.

Make your learners creators of content, not merely consumers...

I don't remember who first said that, or where I heard it -- but that's the secret of using technology I believe.

Getting your students to write

The excellent teachingenglish.org.uk site has a new article on Making writing communicative (which it often isn't in a language classroom, particularly when writing is something the learner does, hands in to the teacher... and that's that).

The article mentions blogging, which is one way writing can be made more communicative, particularly if all your learners are writing on a single class blog, and writing comments on each others' work, too. Doing so, and creating something that is shared will also create "tasks that are intellectually satisfying", I would suggest.

Among the books listed in the bibliography at the end of the article is Process Writing (Arndt and White, Longman 1991), one which I can highly recommend. Getting people to write in pairs, or at least to comment on each other's work (whether or not it is via a blog) is one aspect of process writing and -- because you talk about what you are writing -- another way in which it can be made communicative.

Getting learners to write -- and read -- stories is another. Some of your learners will no doubt say that they don't like writing, but there's also fun in the process that I think even they will come to share.

Here's a fun story from Ananova.com about fish making a bolt for it from a trout farm that might make the start of a piece of (shared) creative writing. Process writing would require you to brainstorm first, before you start to write: who will the narrator be? One of the characters named in the story? Or one of the trout, perhaps?

And that's where the fun begins...

>> More on Process Writing

A single digital image... plus text!

Things that matter to me...

In the CELTA session we had this morning I suggested a project using a digital camera -- and the image above is one that one of you took.

What I would suggest is passing the camera round from pair to pair and getting the learners to take the pictures, and then writing about each other's objects (which will lead to more interaction than if they just write about their own object...). In our session, we didn't have time to produce the texts, but basically the text would involve writing about why the object photographed means a lot to your partner.

Incidentally, among the pictures taken this morning there were some lovely pictures of the photos of your kids which some of you had in your wallets. I chose not to publish them, and picked the one above, because -- on the grounds of privacy issues -- I'm always very reluctant to publish images of children (and would never do so of my young learners without written, signed parental permission).

The original idea came from techlearning.com and we've used it with people learning Spanish at IH Barcelona, publishing the text and images on our En mi bolsillo blog.

Great new things from a great ELT site

TeachingEnglish.org.uk, possibly the best site on the Web for ELT...

One of the first things I do every morning is check if there's anything of interest in my RSS feeds [explanation] -- what useful new content might have appeared on websites I know are interesting, but haven't got the time to check.

Via RSS, I track the excellent TeachingEnglish.org.uk site, which this morning has three new things of interest:

1. An article on presenting new language
2. An article on how to set up a class magazine project (something which, personally, I would suggest you do online with a blog)
3. A question: What makes a good teacher?
   

In the case of the latter, there aren't currently any answers -- but I think it's a great question, and questions are things that, as teachers, I think we should keep asking ourselves about our teaching and our learners learning. The talk section on the site is an interesting one...

If you already have an overdose of information, and RSS sounds like a further dose, you could set TeachingEnglish as your default start page. As you can see in the image above, you would have spotted those three articles this morning.

Me, from A to Z

Not so well-known as the big ELT publishers, Delta Publishing has an excellent "Professional Perspectives" series of resource books for teachers (image, right).

My favourite is Chandler and Stone's The Resourceful English Teacher, which has lots of practical ideas on how to use things like the OHP, video etc (though an update -- or a new title -- to cover the Internet would be an idea).

I also like some of the ideas in Chris Sion's Creating Conversation in Class ("Student-centred interaction"), including "Myself from A-Z", which suggests having them create an "A-Z of your own life", which might be a great way to have people get to know each other at the start of the year, as it will reveal a surprising amount about yourself.

As is pointed out, you need to give a few examples, which can be "trivial, personal or humorous". I found it surprisingly difficult to complete an A-Z of my own life, but don't think it matters if your learners can't. My own examples:

• A is for...?
• B is for Barcelona, where I've lived for over 25 years
• C is for cycling, which is one of my great passions in life
• D is for drawing, which is one of the other things I enjoy doing most (though perhaps doodling would be the correct term...)
• E is for...?
  

The book seems to suggest a "whole class" presentation, but small group, or pairs, might work better, I think.

It's also something that might work well on a class blog, on which each learner could post (and update) their own...

Cutting your images down to size

The pictures from the camera (left), around 0.9 MB each, reduced to under 10 kb (right)

Someone asked this at a seminar I gave last month: don't the images you upload on to your blog quickly take up all your available space?

If you are using Blogger, you've in fact got 300 MB of space for images, so you do have quite a lot of room. If you're using something else, like your school's own server, for example, you might run into problems quicker.

There are two things you can do to trim the size of the images you are uploading:

1. Adjust the settings on your camera (assuming, that is that you are using a digital camera to create your own images) -- so that the resolution is low and the size of the images small
2. Edit the images using an image editor -- like Photoshop or Fireworks, Gimp (which is free) or Picasa (also free)

The images in the illustration at the top of this post were taken on a good digital camera, on which the settings had not been altered. By editing the images with Fireworks, however, reducing the resolution and cutting the size of the images to 200px by 200px, the saving was enormous, as you can see.

MySpace or Our Space?

The Electric Shoes: Great band, great example of what you can do with MySpace

In the US in particular, My Space is hugely popular, though there have been doubts raised in US High Schools about security problems (do you want it to be that easy for all those crazy people out there in cyberspace to contact your young learners?).

Here's a great example (not ELT-related) of what you can do with MySpace.

MySpace is very easy to use, and I can see why your teenagers might love it...

Our space, not my space
Personally, however, I've got two things against it, one the security issue (check how many of the MySpace FAQs refer to security: there must be a problem with it!).

The other is that I hate the name "my space".

One of the technologies I do like a lot for language learning is blogging, particularly if what you've got is a collaborative, team blog, to which all your learners contribute.

Then you're talking our space, not my space...

Our amazing houses project

Carla's spaceship house (not shown, the accompanying description)

The kids (8-10 year olds) with one of my colleagues here at IH Barcelona, Oliver Harris, have produced some absolutely fabulous houses.

The idea came from the Macmillan Heinemann coursebook Little Detectives Oliver is using, where there is an example. The kids then came up with a Sun Flower House, an Umbrella House, a Dustbin House, a Cloud House, and Shell House, and many others.

"Last year they came up with even more amazing things," Oliver says. "My favourite was a Rolling House, which was inside a football! Kids have just got so much imagination -- and the detail is just so incredible."

A blog project?
We're currently displaying the project on a noticeboard in the corridor. Had Oliver ever thought of incorporating technology into the project somehow, say, publishing the work on a class blog?

"I'm a bit of a technophobe," Oliver confesses, "but yes, I'm sure they'd love it."

The work they've done really is something to be proud of. There are two good reasons why you might want to use technology there: (a) because they'd love it, as Oliver says, and (b) a blog would be something to be even more proud of: "We made that!"

Setting up a blog with Blogger

You want a blog...? First of all you need a Google account!

Blogger is one of the best options for blogging. You first step, however, has to be to go to Gmail and set up an account (1, in the image above).

Next, go to Blogger.com...

Next you want to go to Blogger.com, where you could "Take a quick tour" (centre of image, above, if you're still not sure what blogging is). "Create your blog now" will start the set-up process, which really is as easy as they suggest.

Sign up for Blogger!

You've got your email (Gmail) address, now you want to give yourself a "display name" (2, in the image above). Your display name is what (automatically) appears where it says "Posted by..." at the foot of each post.

Your blog title and address...

Now you have to give your blog a title (3)... It's about your thoughts on life? Make that "My thoughts on life" (or whatever). The "blog address" (or URL) (4) is where it will actually be published on the web.

What do you want your blog to look like...?

Your "template" determines (automatically) what your blog will look like. Choose the least horrible looking for now, and come back and change it afterwards (when you will also get more options), if you want.

... and that's it!

Your blog has been created. Click "start posting" to do just that -- it really is that simple.

Blogging... why it's just like email!

You are now ready to start posting on your blog. Virtually all the buttons there will be familiar to you from emailing.

While there's a bit more still to learn (how to personalise your template, upload images, create links and so on), blogging really isn't complicated.

If you can email, you can blog...

Protecting your (young) learners' privacy

If you're teaching young learners, it's absolutely vital that you protect their privacy, don't give away their emails etc.

No, you don't want your blog listed!

If you have set up your blog at Blogger, the first thing to alter is the default "Yes" marked (1), above. Having no links (listing) pointing to you will make your blog much harder to find, which makes this a vital step.

If you're using something other than Blogger, you'll want to take similar steps.

Determine who can comment... Under "Settings" > "Comments"

You want to change who can comment. The default "only registered users" (2, above) in fact includes anyone with a Blogger account -- which includes an awful lot of people desperate to sell you sex toys and Viagra (etc). Your alternatives are "anyone" (no, thanks!) or "only members of this blog" -- neither of which are ideal.

Assuming that you have made all your learners members (under "Settings" > "Permissions", see below), you want that third option.

Alternatively, if you did say "no" to "listing" your blog (see above), choose "anyone".

Mail posts to yourself

Under "Settings" > "Email", you can enter an email address (3, above), like your own, which means that any posts on the blog get mailed to you. That's worth doing if your learners are going to post to the same "team" blog; you thus get alerted by mail to new posts (and to any undesirable posts).

Who can read your blog...?

By default "Anyone" can read your blog. Change that to "only blog authors" (4, above) and only you and your students can do so (assuming that you have made them "authors" that is).

If you were the sole author, writing for your students, selecting "only people I choose" would limit your audience to the class (and would require log in, as you can see above.)

Protect your profile, too
From the top right hand side of your screen, you can access your "dashboard", which allows you to manage your blog (or blogs, if you have more than one), and to edit your profile.

The default settings for your profile are shown below:

You don't want young learners to share their profile with the world (5, above), so click that off; you don't want their names published (6), leave that as it is; and -- vitally -- you don't want to reveal their email accounts (7), so leave that too.

And finally...
With young learners, you should also obtain the school's permission to blog, and (written, signed) permission from the parents.

Word collages

Life: a collage...

In the Spanish Department here at IH Barcelona we have a blog project "Las palabras más bellas", in which students each write a post on what they consider the "loveliest" word.

A colleague, Susana Ortiz, got her learners to produce collages to accompany their words. She took a pile of magazines, scissors and glue into class, and had a fun 15-minute activity which also produced a surprising amount of language ("Can you lend me the scissors?", "Has anyone got a picture of a flower?" etc).

For the blog, the students used a digital camera to photograph their collages (with more language practice discussing how best to take the pictures...)

It was fun, it produced a lot of language practice, it had a neat end product and made only minimal, non-intrusive use of technology...

I'd suggest that is how we should use technology in our classrooms.

Nice poster, couldn’t we have put it on a blog?

Nice poster, couldn’t we have put it on a blog?

The kids in IH Barcelona have been producing travel posters, which as you can see we then display on noticeboards around the school (and not just in individual classrooms).

I like having people create posters in the classroom: it’s the making of things together that I particularly like, the collaborative, creative writing involved.

If you don't have the technology, or ease of access to it (and it’s not that easy here), it's a big step up from writing it (on your own), handing it in and forgetting about it, which is what writing was apparently about when I was a kid at school.

Couldn’t we put it on a blog?
The same sort of project could, of course, easily go on a blog. Among the obvious advantages:

• The kids can post drafts
• You (the teacher) can write comments, make suggestions, etc. on drafts
• Other kids can, likewise, comment, ask questions, add things…
• Other people (including parents…) can see it
  

A blog is also longer-lasting than a poster, and they are again "making things together" but, with a blog, something bigger, which they can be even more proud of.

Taking pride in your work, that’s one of the things I like about blogs. Who's ever going to be proud of a scrappy piece of paper a teacher has scrawled all over in red ink?

However…
When your kids post it on the Internet, what are they going to illustrate it with? They could of course just go steal the images off of Google. Google stole them anyway, so why shouldn’t they...?

I’ve got my moral qualms about doing that, myself. If you must, then I’d say if you made your blog entirely private, you might just about dismiss the qualms. But what kid wants an entirely private blog? What’s the point…?

You could get round the problem either (1) by having the kids create their own artwork, scan it and upload it or (2) by having them steal their images but by significantly digitally altering them (with a proper image editing program), to create "new" images, possibly in the form of collages.

•If you don't have an image editing program, you can download Gimp for free...

Dealing with spam comments on your blog

Spam comment! Alarm, alarm! Shown, message in my email box. I have all comments e-mailed to me, so that I can then go and eliminate spam immediately

One of the problems keeping a blog entails is that other people will come along and deface you blog with irrelevant comments, the only "value" of which is to create a link to their own sites, and thus persuade the search engines to rank their sites more highly. Spam comments (like email spam) generally, though not always, relate to sex or drugs.

To avoid spam comments you can do various things. From most to least drastic, in terms of how easy you want to make it for genuine comments:

• Not allow comments of any kind. Assuming you are using Blogger, go to Comments >> Settings and under "Comment defaults for posts", choose no comments. No one can comment then, not even your Mum!
• Select who can comment. Go to Comments >> Settings and under "Who can comment" select "Anyone" (including all spammers); "Only registered users" (in effect, all spammers with a Blogger account -- that's what registered users means); or "Only members of this blog". You maybe want the latter if you are using it with a class of students
  
• Not make your blog a public one. With Blogger, go to Settings >> Basic and under "Add your blog to our listing", pick "no". I can't remember ever having seen a spam comment on any of my "private" blogs. Highly recommended if it's one intended only for you and your students
• Turn on "comment moderation". Which means you will be alerted to new comments, and have to approve them or otherwise
  
• Turn on the "comment notification" feature . Go to Setttings >> Comments, and add an email address at the foot of that page. New comments will then get emailed to you, with a handy link to go delete them, if necessary (see also image, top of this post)

Note that clever spammers never comment on recent posts, they always go for the ones they think you won't look back at.

Spammers please note: I remove all spam comments almost immediately from this blog and would thank you not to waste my time or your own.

Mini-sagas and 100-word stories

Mini-sagas
The idea for mini-sagas came from an excellent book by Puchta and Schratz, Teaching Teenagers, one that I highly recommend if you ever have to teach teens.

Their rules for this creative writing exercise are:

• Each saga must have exactly fifty words
• The title can contain up to a maximum of five other words
• The saga can only be a story (not a joke, description of someone, etc)
  

100-word stories
This idea came from Michael Lewis's The Lexical Approach, another book that all language teachers should read, and is similar.

• Each story must have exactly 100 words
• The title can contain up to a maximum of five other words
• None of the words can be repeated

Yes, that is what is meant: if your title was 5 words, your story would contain a total of 105 words, none of which would be repeated.

You'd obviously require a fairly decent level of English to do this second one -- around Upper Intermediate at least, I would suggest.

What's this got to do with technology?
Of course, both of the above creative writing exercises you could do without ever going near a computer.

Whether or not you used technology for them, I would recommend a collaborative, process writing approach, with students reading each other's work, and commenting on it, before they ever hand it in to you, "finished" (another recommendation: Process Writing, by White and Arndt).

Personally, I would get my learners to write on computers -- apart from anything else as it makes it so much easier for them to edit and correct. Ask students to make amendments to something they've hand written, and they'll understandably be a bit put out. Ask them to amend a Word document, and it's just so easy!

Computers were just made for process writing...

Blogging projects
Both of the above would make great blogging projects. Have all your students as authors on the same "team blog", and get them to write their stories as posts, which they can save as drafts until they are ready for others to comment on them.

They could write new posts for second versions, and perhaps a separate one for final versions.

Important that they do use the comments feature... Blogging was just made for collaborative writing.

Blogger Beta

Blogger Beta: Drag and drop your page elements wherever you want... in theory!

If you are creating a new Blogger account, you'll now be creating it with the new "Blogger Beta".

Setting a blog up with Blogger Beta is virtually unchanged [how to set up a blog on the "old" Blogger], but once you've got it up and running, adding things like lists of links are a lot more intuitive, as you can "drag and drop" them, rather than having to edit the code.

In the image above, for example, you can see me dragging my "links" section, which I want to appear above the "+info" section of my page.

One other big advantage of Blogger Beta is that it means that you can add "labels" (aka categories) to your posts -- which means that your user can then navigate the posts labelled (for example) "blogging" or "grammar", or whatever other labels you want to give them.

So far, the only real problem I've come across is that it seems a lot harder to do things if you want to be able to create a truly personal design (not something you want to attempt anyway if you are starting out in blogging).

The Blogger Beta "help" file is not quite as comprehensive as the old one. Partly that's because up front, things got simpler -- but get down under the hood, and it's more complex.

As a geek, wanting to get my hands dirty, I'm glad I came across Blogger Beta for Dummies, which is very useful in explaining how to do things if you really want to know.

The Google Groups for Blogger are somewhere else you could turn to for help.

National icons: a webquest, blogging project?

A cup of tea, a national icon... Not so the Digestive biscuit (yet!)

Among the Yahoo headlines this morning, "Underground map and red telephone boxes become English icons".

The website www.icons.org.uk has a long list of "England's best-loved things" -- including cheddar cheese, a cup of tea, The Archers, Dr Who and fish and chips. You want to suggest another, you can...

Apart from the possibility of using the site (and others) for a webquest, you could probably build an interesting blog project on the same idea -- the things that your learners regard as being icons for their own country.

Note the "what is an icon" section.

You want a digital copy of the Yahoo article for use in class? Ask me...

Class reader blogging project

If you use "class readers" with your students -- ie you all read a book together, either an abridged "graded reader" or the real McCoy -- here's something you might do with a blog, an amazing blogging project done in a Missouri high school as they read Guerrilla Season, which brings in author Pat Hughes as well as the kids.

A class library blog would also make a great project.

Why? A blog gives writing a purpose (it's no longer just to hand it in to the teacher, to keep him/her satisfied) -- so that the learner wants to write.

I think a blog of this nature can also make the learner want to read a book, partly because they want to then write about it -- because it's something being done and shared in a community (the class, the members of the blog...)

Project #2 A class (library) blog

Level: Vary widely, Intermediate to well above

Circumstances: Students in secondary school, doing 6 hours English a week, with an extensive (though under-used) library of "graded readers"

Classroom time required: None; students do task as homework

Brief outline: Students are required to read a minimum 3 graded readers per term as homework. Once they have read a book, they will post their review on the class blog. Reviews to include title, author, brief plot outline, whether or not they liked it and why (not), links to 2-3 related websites, and an illustration.

Equipment required: None. All children have an Internet connection at home (with PCs also available to them at school).

To find out more about blogs and blogging:
This article on TeachingEnglish.org.uk gives a brief introduction, and you will find more posts on blogging here.

See also the "Quick Tour" at Blogger.com.

Project #4 A teacher's own, private reflective blog

Level: Any

Circumstances: Teacher in language school, teaching a variety of levels

Classroom time required: None

Brief outline: Teacher spends approx. 60 mins a week writing online diary (blog), in which s/he reflects on what has happened in classes taught that day/week

Equipment required: Internet access; (free) blog account at Blogger.com.

To find out more:

• Diaries as research tools
• An example
  

Why is blogging (not) so cool and innovative?

The question was in fact one of the muddiest points from the June 16 session: "Why is blogging so cool and innovative?"

They're not, is the simple answer to that... It's just that geeks like myself get very enthusiastic about their new toys and I think it's only right to treat what such people say with a healthy dose of scepticism....!

"Cool" and "innovative" are not words I'd apply to blogs and blogging, and I think that even if they were, that would be a very poor reason to use them in the language classroom.

My basic criteria for using any technology in the classroom would be (1) how much time is it going to take up, before, during and after class; and (2) what return am I going to get on my investment -- and more importantly what return are my learners going to get on the investment?

Because blogging is so easy to learn to do (as opposed to say, using an interactive whiteboard, or writing your own multimedia material) and because the return on the investment is high -- those are the reasons why I'd use a blog, not because it's cool.

If you want something that's cool, that has what we might call the "WOW! factor", try an interactive whiteboard. One of my colleagues here at IH uses one quite a lot, and says her teenagers all say "WOW!" or "Cool!" when she plays MP3 files on it, displays the lyrics, blanks out the lyrics and so on...

Blogging is not quite like that, though you could get into its cousin, podcasting, and then they could publish the MP3 files, and wouldn't that be cool!

Blogging has got more to do with creating something from nothing, collectively, and caring about it, and owning it, and belonging to it...

Oh dear, I'm getting over-enthusiastic about it again... And the doctor told me not to!

Of course, you could just get your students to write things on a bit of paper for you, and hand it in... But now that would not be cool -- or even vaguely interesting...

Muddiest points, 16 June

There were various "muddiest points" in today's session regarding blogs and blogging...

Again, for some of these there were already answers on this blog, so I'll point you there for some of them:

How do you set up a blog?
There are lots of providers of blogging services, with Blogger.com being one of the best known. Here's how to set a blog up with Blogger; here's how to set a blog up at Zoomblog, which is what this blog used to use; and here's a comparison of the two.

Note that if you're not that confident with technology, Blogger may prove just slightly easier for you.

If you want a really simple, really basic blog, then an alternative would be Yahoo 360º, for which you'd need a Yahoo account.

How blogging can be useful in English teaching
I'll point you to a previous post to answer the question what can you do with a blog?

More about blogs and blogging
To learn more about the subject, you have further links in the sidebar.

And one last "muddiest point" for today...
Why is blogging so cool and innovative?

What is a blog?

In today's session we are going to look first at what a blog is and what elements you normally would find on one.

Look at the following example blogs, and see if you can see what they have in common...

• The Guardian's technology blog
• The TechLearning blog
• This blog...
• Teaching Young Learners of English
• An example of a splog (spam+blog=splog)
• Boing Boing (one of the most successful blogs ever)

Is a blog open to anyone?

The muddiest points [ explanation ] from our special session on blogs and blogging, in which -- among other things -- we set up our own blogs...

Is a blog open to anyone? Can anyone post on a blog?
Well, that depends on what "settings" you choose for it.... Is your blog a private diary, perhaps one in which you reflect on your teaching? Is it intended for other people? Do you want those other people to be limited to your friends and family -- or is it for absolutely anyone out there in cyberspace...?

Likewise, if it is a blog you are using with a class, you might want to consider whether or not you want to protect their privacy or not (especially if they are youngish children).

If you have set your blog up at blogger.com (as we did today), you've got the "Basic" tab under "Settings" (shown above). Answering "No" to the question "Add your blog to our listings" gives you a certain amount of privacy. Someone would then need to know the address of your blog (you could give it to them), in order to be able to access it.

One of the other settings you might want to change is who can write comments on your blog. The "Comments" tab under "Settings" allows you three choices there (as shown above), and if you "enable comment moderation" (shown below), all comments will come to you first for approval, before they get published.

You might want to enable comment moderation, by the way, as otherwise -- especially on a public blog -- you will end up with "spam" (junk) comments.

Note that "only registered users" means anyone with a Blogger.com account. Personally, I choose "Anyone" for "Who can comment?" but then enable moderation.

More "muddiest points" from today's session...

• What's a permalink?
• Editing the links on a blog
• The difference between a blog and a discussion board

The answers to these three questions are in separate posts, below...

What's a permalink?

More muddiest points from today's session...

What's a permalink?
If you know the URL (address) of a blog, you can go there and read it -- or at least you can go there and read the latest post(s) on it. However, you might want to be able to go not to the latest post but to a particular, earlier one. For that, you need the permalink -- the permanent one, that is, which isn't going to change.

On Blogger.com, rather confusingly, the permalinks are in fact hidden in the time at which they were posted (see the foot of this post). On other blogs, you will find that the permalink may be in the title of the post.

Typically, bloggers (people that blog, that is!), link to posts on other blogs -- and they want to link to that post, not the blog in general.

Editing the links on a blog

How do you edit the links that appear on your blog?
Again on Blogger.com, editing the links that appear in the sidebar on your blog requires you to do just a little delicate copying and pasting of your "template".

You need to go to the "Template" tab (shown above), and scroll way down it to near the bottom. Don't be frightened by all that code, you only really need to understand a very little of it!

What you are looking for is something that looks like this:

<h2 class="sidebar-title">Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a></li>
<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me</a></li>
<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me</a></li>
</ul>

Replace "Google News" by whatever it is you want the link to say, and replace the http://news.google.com/ by whatever you want the link to actually be.

This would create a link to Yahoo News:

<h2 class="sidebar-title">Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://news.google.com/">Google News</a></li>
<li><a href="http://uk.news.yahoo.com/">Yahoo News</a></li>
<li><a href="http://EDITME">Edit-Me</a></li>
</ul>

Notice -- very importantly -- that I took care to leave the inverted commas and > and < signs highlighted in that line!
The explanation of how to proceed from the Blogger.com "Help" file...

The difference between a blog and a discussion board

Partly it's a difference of (1) philosophy. People post things on a discussion board for which there will then (hopefully!) be answers; things are organised by topic...

On a blog, however, things are generally organized chronologically, with the latest posts definitely appearing first. The previous ones are archived, but things are definitely organised by date...

Another difference, I would suggest, is that (2) the end result is that a blog is generally going to look and feel more attractive. I recommend blogging -- particularly a (single) class blog, which your learners author -- partly because in creating something from nothing, they create something they are then proud of. If that's the case, they will want to do things on it...

Discussion boards tend to become (3) terribly messy places, and are often (4) a nightmare to have to search your way around. Blogs tend (at least superficially) to look more organised and rather more permanent.

A blog is also (5) far easier for the average user to set up and manage.

Now of course you might actually want a discussion board, and that might in fact be the best tool for what you want to do...

Muddiest points, 6 April

Not surprisingly, as we had no Internet connection, and I couldn't show you what a blog is, "blogs" was the muddiest point for the session this morning. Always have a "Plan B", as I suggested!

Specifically, someone said "the way in which blogs can be useful in English teaching". In a previous post, I suggested some of the things that you can do with a blog...

Do feel free to use the "comments" link that you will find below each of the posts on this blog, by the way!

In previous posts I've also explained how to set a blog up, both on Blogger.com and on Zoomblog.

Two others -- which a 90-minute session really doesn't give us time to look at properly -- were RSS and podcasting.

And finally, difficulties with the terminology, something lots of people find hard -- but which shouldn't put you off using technology!

What's the purpose of this blog?

"What's the purpose of this blog?" someone noted as their "muddiest point" after the March 17 session.

It has a number of different purposes, including the following:

• It allows me to share things with you -- notably the useful websites in the "links section".
• It gives you an example of a blog
• It is a blog that you can actually use in a number of ways

Favourites and other things
The links on the right are ones that come from my "Favourites" -- websites that I have bookmarked as being interesting and useful. One of the lessons that long experience with the Internet has taught me is "Don't search!": bookmark useful sites, and you won't have to waste time on Google. Bookmark this blog, and you've got a series of useful websites two clicks away.

Most of the links on the right are in fact on the handout from the session; but a blog is more practical for two reasons: (1) you can just come here and click, and not have to labouriously copy the address out and (2) before each session (ie once a month) I check that all the links actually still work.

The blog also allows me to share other things with you -- such as other useful sites that I come across after your session.

An example of a blog
Of the various possible ways in which you can use technology in language teaching (see handout from the session), to my mind a blog is one of the most exciting.

You can use a blog in many ways but, whichever way you use it, a blog fulfills two important criteria:

1. Blogs are not that time-consuming: they have minimum set-up time, take no longer than e-mail to post to, and -- assuming that you are doing a collaborative blog, either with your students or with other teachers -- needn't take up hours of your time writing
2. The return on investment is high: if -- for example -- your blog is a "learner diary", of your experiences in the classroom, and your reflection makes you think and your thinking makes you learn (about teaching, that is)... or if -- to take another example -- it's a class blog which gives a purpose to your learners' writing, motivates them and leads to a sense of belonging to a community... then in those, and many other ways, your time has been well spent

Personally I feel that a lot of technology doesn't fulfill those two criteria for (poorly paid, pressed-for-time) language teachers.

Use this blog
There are various ways in which you can use this blog, one of which is merely coming back to it to find those useful links.

Apart from that, you can participate in it, by commenting on any of the posts. There are a number that I think are interesting which our 90-minute introductory session doesn't allow time for -- for example in the "intro session" category. You comment, I'll reply -- and then we have dialogue, and that can only be good in any classroom.

You can also subscribe to this blog by RSS. "Don't search, have things come to you" is one of the primary lessons 12 hours a day on the Internet has taught me!

FAQs: The difference between a website and a blog?

Someone asked "What's the difference between a blog and any other website...?"

I came across this explanation on Wikipedia the other day:

How blogs differ from traditional sites
A blog has certain attributes that distinguish it from a standard web page. It allows for easy creation of new pages: new data are entered into a simple form (usually with the title, the category, and the body of the article) and then submitted. Automated templates take care of adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page (Permalink), and adding the article to the appropriate date- or category-based archive. It allows for easy filtering of content for various presentations: by date, category, author, or other attributes. It allows the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permission and access are easily managed.

I'd suggest that it's the ease of blogging that really distinguishes it, at least from the teacher's point of view, that and the fact that much of the work is automated for you.

A blog requires very little technical knowledge, and creating it (as opposed to actually writing it) takes up very little time -- and the end result looks fairly professional.

You probably don't have the technical knowledge to create a professional looking website -- and certainly don't have the time to create one for your class/es.

Let me recommend Wikipedia -- it's a great alternative to Google-is-Evil...

What can you do with a blog (1)?

We are going to look at six examples of things you could use blogs for.

My first example is this blog itself: I use it with you, my learners.

I have suggested that before you use technology with your learners you should ask yourself:

• How much of my time is it going to take up -- before, during and after class?
• Whether or not that investment will pay off in terms of better (more) learning?

Bearing the above questions in mind, would you want to do something similar with a class of English language learners? Why / why not?

Use the "Comments" link below to write your answer...

What can you do with a blog (2)?

Example 2, a blog which I did with half a dozen people who took CELTA and found themselves teaching young learners.


We no longer keep it updated -- it ran for 10 weeks, as an experiment. In the illustration above, a site I thought their young learners might like to use to build a fish.

Here, we weren't actually using the blog for our learners, but for ourselves -- the teachers -- in the hope that we could learn things by reflecting on our teaching and sharing things of interest to the group.

Questions as before -- would you learn from a similar project, with fellow teachers, and would it be a worthwhile investment of your time....?

What can you do with a blog (3)?

Example 3: This is in fact a blog we do with people learning Spanish in our Spanish Department. We ask them to describe an item that they have in their pockets...


Question as before -- would you want to do something similar with a class of English language learners, why / why not...?

What can you do with a blog (4)?

Example 4 is not in fact a blog -- it's an idea for a blog.

Someone on our trainee support group, teaching "a group of Brazilian teenagers here in the U.S. on a sort of pseudo educational vacation", asked the following question:

"This group is driving me insane! I've never come across a group of less behaved, unmotivated and basically spoiled brats in my life. (... ) most of these kids come from very wealthy families (...) and are generally accustomed to having everything done for them (...) How do you teach someone who not only hasn't a desire to learn but seems to refuse to?!"

My suggestion was:

"Being a total geek, I think I'd go for a geeky technological answer. I'd put them into smallish groups (3s?) and say they have 48 hours to produce the first issue of an online paper (I'm assuming their pseudo educational vacation in NY includes decent Internet access). They'd have to decide on sections, content, headlines, images -- the lot. And then produce it as a blog. Then they've got to produce the next issue 48 hours after that."

Questions as before: would you want to do such a project with your learners, why (not)? And would it work in this particular case, do you think?