As the
popularizing of Internet, students no matter teenagers or adults are all
familiar with the applications of Internet. Twitter, weblog and other SNS
websites have become to important tools for social contacts. Nevertheless, those
tools are seldom used in pedagogy at least in China.
If those
technologies can be used appropriately in teaching, they can be very helpful
indeed. For instance, I can ask my students to write weekly journals in English
in their blogs. The content can be interesting things they encountered，expression
of emotion，critique about current affairs etc. They can use blogs in the most
common way which they are familiar with. The only different thing is that I
will read all of them and comment them, then choose several good writings to
recommend to my students to read carefully. I can also ask my students to
comment on the models about their merits as well as to give some suggestions.
In this way, we can save a lot time of reading the models in class; and
students can interact with each other directly, which helps them to learn
better. Moreover, weblogs can also serve as good recorders of their thoughts
and improvements, which can be meaningful to them when they grow older.
Another way to use
weblog in L2 teaching is that I can assign a topic for my students and ask them
to collect materials from other people’s blogs then write their own opinions
about the topic. All these things must be done in English. Through using weblog，my students
can select those materials which they are interested in and acquire the newest
information from others’ blogs since Internet is a real-time updated media. Moreover,
they can make their judgment by themselves to choose the useful and convincing
materials from numerous different thoughts and develop their own opinions. Since
critical thinking is also one of the important abilities students should acquire
in class as the ISTE standards shows, weblog really outweighs traditional
teaching in this respect. This process is also referred as “connective writing”
in Will Richardson’s book; students will have more audiences much more than
only their classmates. Therefore they can absorb more knowledge since more
people can be involved in their collaborative learning process. The depth of curriculum
can also be enhanced. Considering that the exercises of reading and writing are
mostly the traditional ones just like the pattern of TOEFL in China, the exercise
using blog will certainly attract students and arouse their interests in
learning English. Though this usage of blog can be really beneficial to
students, it can also have negative influence on students if they are exposed
to bad information. Therefore, it is also important for teacher to take the
responsibility of filtering information when utilizing blog in pedagogy.
