A Model Blog Post

 

Dear All

 

Please don't think that your post has to be exactly the same as below. This is just an example.

 

Jon

 

 

 

The Blog Post - this is what you have to do:

You make a post on the Sub-Module Blog (click on the link on the sub-module home page to access it), with this information in it:

 

 

http://www.flexlearning.se/englishcourses/ictmodule1bc/ictbuspages.htm

Describe an ICT resource which is available to you, as a teacher, or to your pupils, paying particular attention to how it works and how it can be used.

This 'ICT resource' might be a commercially-available computer programme, a tool (such as Flash, Skype or an iPhone) or a well-filled website (i.e. a web site with lots of functions and activities, not just a single page of information).

 

Model Blog Post

 

The Olympus  VN-600PC digital voice recorder.

 

This is a very simple machine which is easy to use and not inhibiting in the classroom.

Students like to perform in front of others and because they only recorded their voices, they pay particular attention to what they say.

 

The results can be posted on podcasting sites. The simple thing is that names and faces are not necessarily posted. The teacher can post the work locally or on a distant server.

 

If the teacher plays back the recordings directly to the students, it is best done through a speaker system, such as a sound system as the tiny speaker on the voice recorder is tinny and difficult to hear when at a high volume.

 

The students are motivated to rehearse and practice projecting their voices and improving the sentence stress and individual word pronunciation.

 

In my opinion the beauty of this system is that the technology is simple and doesn’t require moving classrooms or bulky equipment. The results can be played again for commenting on. Students can easily rerecord some work to try to improve it.

Because there are no images, it is easier to get parental permission to publish a student podcast, for example.

 

Also because there are no images, the students can concentrate on pronunciation, intonation and stress, and hear results.

 

The results can be listened to on a laptop or posted on a podcasting site.

 

Further work could be podcasts on particular topics, class designed listening exercises, or a class news programme.

 

Welcome to the Blog

I see that some of you already found this blog. Welcome to the Blog where you will be able to post your ideas. This is an area to give some practical ideas using an ICT resource that you have used in the classroom and to comment on other people’s ideas. The deadline is 8 January 2012, but you are welcome to post things earlier.  

You are required to publish a Blog Post and then to comment on what other people have posted in a constructive way, perhaps to agree or suggest an extension of its use, or perhaps to ask for clarification or anything else. Do feel free to comment on people’s comments, as I have done below. The idea is that we participate in sharing information which could be useful in our classrooms and learn how to use Blogs themselves.

I will comment in general on people’s ideas, but my mark will be given in private.

I’m looking for simplicity, both in the examples of using ICT and in your clear use of English in giving instructions so as to enable another teacher to use the information in their classroom.

Below are the Blog Post and Blog Comment tasks and the webpage addresses from the Business Pages of the course.

I’m looking forward to receiving your work.

Jon Clark

Valladolid, Spain

Hello!

What a miracle!! I did it : )

Hi!

Ok I think I made it.... ;)

About Blogs

Well, you've made it so far! Blogs can be very useful for teachers and pupils because you have a channel of communication you can use for each other - and for the parents.

When you set a blog up you can also choose to make it entirely open and accessible (like this one) or more or less hide it altogether, so that only the people you've invited to read it can even find it. It'd be a bit of a pain at the start of the term, but let's say you've got 20 pupils in your class, each of whom has a school e-mail address and each of whose parents have one mail address between them.

That'd involve you in sending a list of 20 addresses to Blogger to be listed as authors and another 20 addresses to be listed as readers. Once you've got the list, it takes no more than a couple of seconds (it's getting the accurate list which takes time). Then you'd have a blog which the pupils can write in and their parents can read which is only accessible to them (and you).

If you wanted to create another blog for the general public, it'd also be possible, perhaps with just you as the author. Let's say you wanted to circulate a particularly good post from the private blog. You just click on the Dashboard link (the B in an orange box), click on View Posts and Edit Post, copy everything from the private post … and go over to the public blog, create a new post and paste the private post into it.

If your school uses a course management system (like Moodle or Blackboard), there'll be a blog function in that. The only problem is that the parents might not have access to it … and it'll be an even bigger pain negotiating with your IT Department to give them access. The parents would probably have to use a different e-mail address than their ordinary one to log on to it too.

Hi!

Hope I have made this right. Looking forward to see how this will work out.

Have a nice weekend

Regards
Pia

How to make a post on the course blog

This is how to make a post on the course blog:

1. You need to make sure that you've logged on to Blogger as the person who has the permission to make posts (i.e. using the ID you used when you accepted the invitation to become an author).

2. Then when you access the blog, you'll see a link (in small, light-blue letters) at the top of the page called 'New Post'. Click on that link and you'll see a text box that looks like this:

I'm in the 'Compose' function right now, but if you wanted to do fancy things with html, you'd click on the 'Edit HTML' tab instead. 'Compose' works fine for most of the things you might want to do.

3. You can either write directly into the text box, or copy and paste your text from, say, a Word document.

The tools in the bar at the top of the text box are fairly standard - you use them to change the formatting of your text after it's in the text box.

4. Blogger saves your draft text automatically at fairly short intervals (the Save Now button goes dark when everything's been saved). When you're ready, though, you could click on the Preview button for a last check on what it looks like … and then you click Publish Post when you're ready.

5. If you notice something you want to change even after you've posted your Blog Post, you've always got the 'Edit Posts' option at the top of the page, or, if you click on the little pen at the bottom of your post in the blog, you come straight back to this Edit page.

Don't forget to add your name to your Blog Post!