Great weblogs

With the end of the term it's time to reflect on what has passed before us.

There really are a number of great weblogs out there, and they reflect a number of things.

The first is that CESL students are gaining technological proficiency, whether it is being able to upload a picture, or make a link, or even make a paragraph look good in a new medium.

The second is that a number of them have made entire portfolios....these represent the finished product of a lot of work. In other words, each paper shows how they struggled, rewrote, found sources, made a reference, etc. So in that sense these papers represent what we can do academically as well as what we are proud enough of to show the world.

Finally, CESL students had fun learning and travelling around, which is beginning to be reflected in their various posts and in CESL Today, which is drawn from the weblogs.

On to another term! Feel free to post here; this is yours too. Welcome Richie! I'll get you linked in a minute!

;-)

Weblog contest

Thank you to the editors of the poetry contest...results will be published soon. There is also a best weblog contest, which may have some minor prizes, and which will hopefully encourage personalization and good design technique to emerge in the future....one can only hope? Actually I think some of our students are much better at this than they're letting on...I can only hope that they will feel comfortable enough to share their skill and show off a little...in English. What I meant to say was, you're a teacher, you have an opinion and an eye for design, give us your input as to which one you believe is best....

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As the term comes to an end I can see that different weblogs are turning out different ways, and that's not all bad. I think that as the students get into it, some will use them more, and others will consistently shy away from them. Getting people permanently connected and permanently used to expressing themselves in public is difficult even for native speakers.

The poetry contest appears to have been a success; just read the poems. The questions we should be asking are: To what degree are our students reading more, participating more, communicating with each other more, becoming more aware of the changing world that we're living in? Are these weblogs helping them learn this kind of participation? How difficult has it been to teach them to use passwords, upload, make links, etc.?

Then again, how many of us are still working on these things?

We'll see how many of them are beyond us, and maybe we'll see how far beyond.