Well, here we start!

Blogging in ELT is a fairly new issue in Russia, therefore I am going to try and research its advantages, explore the opportunities it opens to students and teachers alike and try to fand ways out of potential problems and setbacks.

I intend to keep this blog in English as this will help to better achieve one of its goals, namely, practise English as well as share ideas on ELT methodology.

So, how can blogging be useful for students and teachers? First of all, it takes some workload off the teacher's shoulders. Instead of giving tasks to students, collecting those tasks and minding the deadlines, a teacher can just start a blog, post tasks there and write by what date and time the response has to be given. The students post their responses online, and the teacher can easily see the date and time of their response. In this way we can save ourselves and the students the trouble of writing their response on a sheet of paper, handing it in, carrying it home and bringing it back to school when checked. Also, a student's work cannot get lost in this way.

Grading students' work becomes easier through a blog. A teacher just posts a response and can copy and paste the phrases that have mistakes in them or just need to be paraphrased or corrected in any other ways.

Students can take part in peer correction or working on a topic/project together by collaborating online in the comments to a blog. Such a online discussion has the benefit of students'' having extra time to think, collect and present their arguments in a logical manner, and the teacher can easily assess each student's work as everyone contribution is visible and written down. By working with a blog each teacher can collect portfolios for her/his students without having to mess around with paper and cardboard or plastic folders.

Privacy may be one of the issues here. A teacher can screen or unscreen any comments to any posting in the blog at any time, thus making some of the writing visible or invisible as the lesson plan requires.

Blogging is a good way of making studies inclusive for students who are on a sick leave and cannot attend the class. We have been increasingly creating and developing materials for our lessons with computers, so it is just as easy to put some materials online for the students as well as bring them to the class.

Of course, not everything is perfect in this world. To be able to use blogs, both the teacher and the students need to have a regular access to the internet. However, more and mre students have such access these days and they are normally more motivated to do something on the internet rather than write anything by hand. Of course, the bulk of teaching still has to be done in class and sometimes in one-on-one lessons, but nevertheless, a blog can be an interesting expansion of the classroom work both for the teacher and for the students.

I would be very interested in reading your comments on these ideas. Has anyone got a personal blog on blogspot, or livejournal or elsewhere? How comfortable are you with putting your ideas online and providing access to them? Would you be willing to try this activity with your students? Here are some possible suggestions of what can be done using a blog:

1. Project work. Each of the students has to do his or her own part of the project. The task is put online in the blog. The students do research, find materials and publish them as comments to the blog entry. In this way the teacher can easily see how much of the project has already been done, and the students can see what else needs doing. Then as a separate entry, the project is put together and published online for every student to see it.

2. Written assignments. The teacher gives an assignment (e.g. "Write a letter" or "write an essay" ) with detailed explanation of what needs to be done, and the students post their responses as comments to the blog entry.

3. Discussions. Some students are very reluctant to participate in discussions in class, and some of them just haven't got enough time for it as they need more time to formulate their arguments or put their ideas in good English. Therefore a teachers can ask his/her students to present their arguments as comments to a blog entry. Each of the students can be asked to give only arguments for or arguments against. True, this is very much like what we do in class ever so often, but this "delayed" conversation gives students more time to think and do their research and deals with the stress of having to speak in front of the class. Besides, arguments can be edited at any time, thus leaving the way to perfection (or at least improvement) open for the student. Some of my colleagues who keep educational blogs, tell that this activity very quickly becomes a favourite with older students, and younger students like it because it allows them to be as creative as they like since this can be used as a preparatory stage for a big classroom discussion.

There are some other ways of using internet resources and ICT for teaching English at school, and I'll be looking into them closer in my next entries.