Reading Prompt II

*Egbert describes the optimal conditions for classroom language learning. Discuss how blogs and blogging can be a tool for achieving these conditions with ELL students. Finally, describe your own experience creating your blog this week. What topic or topics do you plan to blog about?

Instead of discussing all parts of the optimal conditions list, let me just say that the entire list meets CALL (computer assisted language learning) conditions for blogs to be used with ELLs (English language learners). Here for brevity, I focus on only one part of the list, condition 7, the principle that a blog gives the ELL a working atomosphere with an ideal stress/anxiety level. This principal is met when students publish on the internet via a blog. ELLs (like any students) can be unmotivated at times, and the stress/anxiety to publish on a blog is a great way to keep students working at the skill. Good old peer pressure works here for the good of education, and additionally, the types of discussions that are held can be adjusted to the level of students involved so that not too much or too little stress/anxiety is applied. It really makes a lot of sense to use one with your class.

Working on this blog has been useful for me. I have seen a lot of blogs in the past, but needed some sort of motivation to create one for myself. This assingment is doing that. My focus these past two weeks has been creating a simple interface, that looks cool, and I continue to make sure all my links are up. The links are a good, simple part of the html skills I have been learning recently, so it is a good way to check my skills.

When I think of things to post here, of course professional work comes to mind, publishing work and having my students post their work and writings. Also, as a historian and family man, I would like to see the living history of my own flesh and blood kept on a blog. Embarrassingly, I have also started to think about how to make money using this technology. Not everyone does (or can do) blogs, I am glad to be part of the group that is in the know.