BLOG

What is this?

This is a sample blog which belongs to Mr Nik. As we can see that the title of this blog, Nik's daily English activities, obviously indicates that Nik provides and updates  a great deal of authentic teaching and learning materials and activities as well as useful online tools and technologies. The resources in this blog are very rich and interesting, such as lyrics training and memorize a song. Meanwhile, the forms of content in this blog are various, including written text, pictures, video and relevant links.

Why is this particular tool or technology relevant to language learning? What approaches to language learning or research underpin the use for this technology?

•  Blogs contain a mass of good resources related to language learning and teaching, such as some articles with specific examples written by the author,
• comments and shared opinions posted by the readers 
• and links to some English learning and teaching journals, websites, and online tools.
• All these resources can be used on English language class effectively. 
• Blog is accessed freely and easily, which facilities both teachers and students to use it on class and after class.  
• Language learners are able to grasp every updated blog and comments from blogger and readers. Therefore, they will learn some new knowledge and others’ perspective that they didn’t familiar before.

How might you use it to foster language learning?

• Teacher firstly introduce the advantages of blog and then show them a blog sample (or teacher's blog), including every function and feature in the blog, in order to make the students be familiar with the blog in terms of the content, the language and the design.
• Teacher presents how to create a blog and ask them to set up their own blogs and complete the profile. Or, ask them to work in pair or groups to set up one blog for a pair or a small group.
• Ask students to post their personal reflection of everyday’s class, or do some flexible and interesting online homework or put forward some questions and give some suggestions in their blogs.Meanwhile, ask them to share their blog address and to visit other's blogs and post comments. Teacher will give feedback and comments on their blogs.

What limitations can you see with the use of this technology?

• Sometimes, some technological problems, such as computer malfuntion and website error will frustrate learning process.
• Not suitalbe for some traditional classroom which will probably not apply computer at all, or some poor areas where have no enough computers or access to internet.
• Might not suitalbe for young learners and beginners, because the former are too young to handle all the blog thing, while the latter are probably not capable to write post or comments in English.