One standard for ESL is: Standard 2: English language learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the area of language arts. Blogging can help with this because there are lots of blogging communities such as Stage of Life which have monthly blogging competitions including academic essay prompts which are then graded and assigned a winner who is given the title "Featured Blogger" for that month. This would be an incentive for kids who like to write but are not as comfortable sharing it in the classroom to expand their world and interact with other students in a way you never have to grade!
Also, following the same standard of academic language arts, you can post questions on your blog and have students put the answers as comments which creates a discussion among the students as they comment on each others thoughts. You can then bring up any questions which had lots of feed back or unresolved thoughts in class to continue the discussion.
Standard 5: English language learners communicate information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in the area of social studies. In studying society and current day issues one of the big issues we are facing is obesity. A good way to connect this issue to blogging is to do a lesson on health and then have students begin their own food blog about what they are eating. Other students can look at each others blogs and comment on good choices that were made to encourage this classmates.
3 comments:
I like your very practical uses of blogging to meet the standards. Good work.
In your first posting about Blogging Lessons, I agree with your thought.
"you can post questions on your blog and have students put the answers as comments which creates a discussion among the students as they comment on each others thoughts"
As your mentioned that, blogging could function as a useful communication tool among students and it also could get rid of many limitations such as restiction of time or place. Then language learners can easily access the target language academically, socially, or cuturally.
Emily,
I really like the idea of posting questions to generate discussion among students in your class. Since classroom time is limited, it can sometimes be difficult for teachers to cover all a course's content in the classroom. Blogs allow teachers to extend the curriculum beyond the classroom.
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