Tools/Blogging

Write for an online audience - blogs

Tool Description Still a popular approach to language teaching, and still underused, blogs^(tool) offer the easiest of ways to publish school news or lab discoveries or whatever winds me up today. Blogging websites allow video and photos to be included alongside text. For example, underneath each post is a comment button which gets feedback - but you can control what happens with a setting. Each of the blogging web sites below offer an overwhelming range of features. All of them generate a 'feed' (RSS feed) where a reader can subscribe to new posts. The RSS is used to alert your readership of new articles, rather than have them re-visit a site that does not change. Services that offer blogging include, BLOGGER (www.blogger.com); WORDPRESS (www.wordpress.org) and TYPEPAD (www.typepad.com). ^(edit)

Teaching Approach. Writing for a public audience when blogging can encourage pupils in their language^(ta) development and offers opportunities for ICT mediated assessment^(ta) including peer assessment^(ta) for example via the use of the 'comment' features. ^(edit)

Tool details
Title	Write for an online audience
Topic	[[Topics/Blogs|Blogs]]
Licence / Cost / Platform	A web tool that is easily available, usually just for the price of registering
Subject / Categories	ToolInfo, Blogs
Teaching Ideas / Links
Link	Try http://www.blogger.com, http://www.wordpress.org, http://www.typepad.com for example