Saturday 15 May 2010

My first blog post

Hello all and welcome to my first posting, on my first blog. This blog was set up as part of week two of an online course 'Widen your classroom with blogs'.

My interest here, and on the above course, is mainly based on the final part of an MA I am doing this summer. I am looking into 'literacy as social practice' and to what extend teachers are...

1. aware of the wider literacy practices of their students and

2. recreate these practices in the process of teaching and learning

If students are blogging, sending instant messages and creating/sharing video on youtube then these are skills that can be put to good use in, and more importantly, 'around' the language classroom. We can 'widen' the classroom in both time and space.

A lot of technology can be just a new way of doing an old thing - and not really innovative. Giving students a space outside the classroom where they can collaborate is relatively new and the possibilities are exciting. I am very much aware that I am NOT that fluent in these wider social media practices - hence this course!

Before the end of this course I may post a link to a questionnaire on this blog, I hope some of you will have time to answer it.

That's all for now, thanks for reading!

John

4 comments:

  1. Your work sounds very interesting and relevant for today! I'll gladly contribute to any questionnaire you have and am certainly interested in the results of your studies.
    Good luck and happy blogging :-)

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  2. I would also like to answer your questionnaire!

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  3. What tools are you planning to use to post a questionnaire on you blog?

    Maybe you can check some of these:

    http://www.surveymonkey.com/

    http://www.freeonlinesurveys.com/

    http://www.surveygizmo.com/

    Looking forward to answering your online questionnaire.

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  4. I have used surveymonkey before, so I will probably stick to what I know!

    ReplyDelete