Hi Everyone,
First of all I like the idea of a blog where we can post ideas and thoughts on our classes, thank you for setting this up.
As the first day of the 2nd semester nears, I find myself thinking of activities to continue to keep my students engaged in the process, whether writing or presenting. I want to be able to keep it interesting for them throughout this next semester. And so I have set up a website for both my BRW and BRD classes as a place for them to add comments, ideas, sites and videos of interest. In some ways this is an experiment to both see how tech savvy and interested they are in discussing and continuing to be engaged in the material outside of class. I know there are some folks at Chuo who have blog sites set up for their students. As the 2nd semester progresses it will be interesting to see how students utilize the site. Also it is in a primitive stage, but I will be adding more information and sections.
Allen
Thanks for the post, Allen. Great idea to make the websites for your BRD and BRW classes a place for students to contribute ideas and information. I think creating spaces online for students to provide input themselves to the research and learning resources is a good way for us to go in the taught-in-English program, and it will be very useful to share our various experiments with this. I know Andy Barfield has put up links from his BRW students for the topics they have chosen to write about. And I'm developing a blog of research resources on Englishes around the world for my seminar that I could invite students to contribute to themselves: http://ewresearch.wordpress.com/
ReplyDeleteI would be very interested to hear more about the mechanics of students putting stuff up on your sites - can they blog those or do they go through you? And also to know how that develops during the semester.
It would be great to say that they are doing it themselves and are engaged outside the classroom with their topics via the website I have put up. But in hindsight, I think this kind of approach needs a good portion of a class time dedicated to getting students up to speed with using websites and blogs. In addition, rather than introduce this in the middle of the school year, introducing it at the beginning of the year in the form of a collaborative project would get them working online. But I do agree with you that this is the direction to go for a number of reasons, one of which is to keep students engaged with the material outside of the classroom.
ReplyDelete