blogs

I decided that rather than commenting on the initial post here, I would start a new strand about blogs per se.
One way of using blogs is for the teacher to be the author and to post things on the blog for students to check whenever they want. This can mean putting up ideas for tasks for them to do - even discussion questions you're going to talk about in class so they can think about them. You can post feedback on what they did in class including key vocabulary that came up and positive feedback on their performance. You can also post links to follow-up work or sites to look at to support what they talked about.

Take a look at the site below which was set up by a teacher of a Korean class, fairly low-level, focussing mainly on speaking. It may seem like a strange think to get students speaking more, but you should be able to see how it can give the students valuable feedback and give a bit of structure to the lessons.

Dorothy and Julia (and anyone else doing blog-based projects in the future) - you may find some of it really useful for picking out key vocabulary to pre-teach.

You may have to cut and paste the link into the browser - I just tried to add a link but it didn't come up in the blog so I'm editing the post to at least give you the website address

http://learningtospeak1b.wordpress.com