English and Blogging

English and Blogging: drawing experiences in teaching
By: Yusuf Morales

Ive been trying the Blog-English teaching method with my students and so far, all of my students have reciprocated.... they have posted some original compositions as well as some "plagiarized" ones. But so far they have been improving.

Ive started them with Gmail and gdocs last semester, and so far my students (who are either 2 year tech students or BS students) and they have realized the possibilities of blogging as a form of expression far better that just putting a friendster profile because they can configure the page as well as do a lot of designs by interphasing flash presentations converted from open impress presentation, that they may have uploaded directly to blogger as a flash file or uploaded to Youtube then pasted the HTML code into the blog.

My English 2 students are exploring the possibilities of the blog as a way of learning and expression. heres a few examples:

http://albryanenglish.blogspot.com/
http://ervenlargo.blogspot.com/
http://nickyenglish.blogspot.com/
http://snake-wwwblogcom.blogspot.com/
http://aiceenglish.blogspot.com/

Well of course these students come from public high schools and from the info they come from the lower sections, so their English is understandably new and developing. I'm hoping that the school newspaper people would also set up their own blogsite where they may post the school paper newsbits. as a form of training and learning for them.

As of the moment also I am also requiring my BS in Information technology students in their Biology class (which I handle them) to post a blogger site their experiences, learnings and new discoveries both in Biology and Blogging.

I do hope that by utilizing a new methodology in teaching by the use of blogging students will be able to improve their learning styles as well as make them more competitive eventually in the modern world.

By the way.... I also emphasize that my students use open office as their productivity suite. I use both open office and Star Office as i am an open document advocate.

As always i say.... open source rocks