THE PURPOSE

This Blog was created in order to publish different segments of an Assignment that is part of the course of the subject called ICT in ELT from the English Teacher Training College at Instituto Nacional Superior del Profesorado Técnico - Universidad Tecnológica Nacional.

AND A LITTLE BIT OF THEORY...

Children raised in the era of new media technologies are less patient with activities such as completion of worksheets and classroom lectures. Decreased participation in a traditional classroom may be due to better feedback received online.

Web 2.0 technologies provide teachers with new ways to engage students, and even allow student participation on a global level. Blogs, wikis and podcasts are examples of social software, which allows people to connect, communicate and collaborate online. Quoting Dudeney & Hockly (2007) a blog is a webpage with regular diary or journal entries. ‘Blog’ is short for weblog. A weblog consists of a chronological list of entries or posts. These entries can contain text, photographs and links to other web pages. It can be set up and used by teachers and/or learners. It can be used to connect learners to other communities of learners. The ideas and content of the blog can be generated and created by learners, either individually or collaborative.

Relating Web 2.0 to language teaching, Michael Thomas (2009) stated that Web 2.0 has many applications in education, both current and potential, but its greatest impact may well be in subjects which foreground language and communication. After all, given the textual nature of the web, all the connections made online and all the communities established there are enabled primarily through the medium of language. As a result, for language and literacy educators, the advent of Web 2.0 presents great opportunities: to decentralize the role of the classroom (Coleman, 2007), escape the language lab, and engage with the younger generation of digital natives on their own territory.

In the words of Paula Ledesma (2010), Internet applications have changed communication forever. Both business and education have found new technologies of substantial use for various purposes. The World Wide Web, the application which has been embellished the most in the last decade, provides its users the possibility of becoming website creators and editors thanks to its latest Web 2.0 variation. As a result, a number of ESL and EFL teachers all over the world have started to integrate Web 2.0 with their teaching. Blogs and Wikis are among the tools that allow its users to display their creativity in a quite simple and even properly guided way. Besides, the combination of various Web 2.0 websites such as video casters, slide sharers and album creators, together with blogs and wikis, allow teachers the possibility of assigning creative tasks where to use the language in a way that can immediately be shared in their own school or classroom website. 

There are some advantages to using blogs in the classroom. Blogs provide a “real-world” tool for learners with which to practice their written English, as well as a way of contacting learners from other parts of the world, of the blog is used as part of an international exchange. Learners can interact with each other, adding comments to the entries.the use of a blog can be seen as a time saver, a blog can be used to make vocabulary available for students or to sending out the instructions to an activity. A blog can be used to give feedback and promoting learners autonomy.

Look at all these advantages; don’t you think it is worth trying?