Part of the Cool Sites series

Perhaps your students are like mine and are not quite ready to make the leap to begin blogging. I work with very young language learners and adult language learners. Many of my adult learners will not put the effort into blogging but that doesn’t mean they will not try learning from a blog. I have found several valuable blogs for my students to learn English. Daily they can receive a lesson through e-mail or through RSS readers. Last semester I decided to teach my students how to learn with blogs.

This was how the first lesson plan went:

  • We were learning about travel in America, therefore I had my students read Shonah Wraith’s post, Big, Bigger, BIGGEST.
  • I asked students to leave comments on Shonah’s post.
  • Shonah did a great job of responding to my student’s questions and comments. Scroll down to the end of the post to see the fantastic results!
  • You can do the same lesson in any subject by telling a blogger ahead of time that your students will visit the blog and asking the blogger to answer the students’ questions.

2nd Phase: Video Tutorials

In the first phase, my students became familiar with the process and realized the amount of learning they could receive through interacting with blogs. Therefore, my next goal was to get my students to subscribe to the blogs. In order to teach them how to do this I made a video tutorial on how to subscribe to blogs with e-mail and get a lesson in their inbox regularly.

I shared this video so that students could also subscribe by Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

List of Blogs

I also shared a list of blogs the students could subscribe to. I told my students to explore the various blogs and subscribe to the ones that best appealed to their learning styles and interests. Each of the blogs had different aspects. Some had audio, others had video, and some had written words. I put these links in my wiki for my adult students to explore. Below are the English lesson blogs I suggested sorted by e-mail subscriptions and RSS subscriptions:

Blogs with e-mail/RSS subscriptions:

Blogs with RSS subscriptions only:

Challenge:

Have your students learn English by interacting on blogs. Gather a list of blogs in your subject area for students to explore.

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What are your favorite blogs in your subject area (math, history, science, English, etc.)? You can have your students even interact on their own blogs?

Do you want to add more blogs to my student list?