Blogging in ELT

Web blog or simply a BLOG is a web site where one or various authors can publish their thoughts, opinions or any other information that they consider important and they appear in a chronological way, from the most recent to the later. It is usual that people can comment about the posts, so this makes it an interactive tool. To be allowed to make a comment depends only on the author of the blog and the intention of it. But in order to be very effective the posts have to be very frequent, maybe once or twice a week minimum.

Usually bloggers (people that have blogs and feed them constantly) connect by adding links of other blogs with the same topic or closely related. This is to comment, to expand their information or debate about it.

The topics of blogs are very varied. There are blogs dedicated to journalism, technology, educational (Edu blogs), about politics, tourism and many other topics.

But my mayor concern is Education of course, and the uses of blogs in English Language Teaching. According to BBC learningenglish web page “blogging is becoming increasingly popular as a language learning tool”. The next are examples of blogs dedicated to teach English or just sharing information with the learners:

http://oupeltglobalblog.com/

http://eltnotebook.blogspot.com/

http://calidadtotaleducativaunesrpaloverde.blogspot.com/

http://anictodyssey.blogspot.com/2014_05_01_archive.html

There are many ways in which that would make our students lives so much easier and of course, ours too. This, since I work with tourism students and I have found a lot of material related to this that I have been unable to share because I do not have a printer available at the institution. By means of this we can avoid the hideous copies that tend to be very expensive too. The next article provides with ideas and at the same time advices based on the writer`s personal experiences with students. It is very real since is written from a teacher to teachers in an easy and understandable language. Currently I follow some blogs related to English teaching, phonetics and phonology, assessment and so on, which I like a lot.

Also I think that blogging is being good with the environment, since we can get rid of the use of paper that most of the students end up throwing them to the garbage.

References: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/blogging-elt 

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