Three ways to teach with a blog!

As the high-pace development of technology, more and more people start to use Internet as a tool to work and study, because there is so much useful information online. A business man can handle his own business sitting at home instead of going abroad every month while a student can write his thesis using the references on the Internet instead of going to the library. In this trend, teachers nowadays are more different that those in the past. More and more teachers choose to add the network element into their teaching. It can help them to convey their idea faster, and also allow them to communicate with the students more. After reading some articles about teaching with the online sources, I found that there were some ways for us to use blog to teach our students.

First, we can post our lectures or newsletters on our blog. As one of the teaching standard of TESOL is "Teachers use knowledge of student performance to make decisions about planning and instruction 'on the spot' and for the future.  Teachers involve learners in determining what will be assessed and provide constructive feedback to learners, based on assessments of their learning", the students can view the articles and get some inspiration from them. Also, we can let them to leave some comments after they have read the blog, in that way, we can better understand the students’ thoughts, and can exchange opinions on some academic issues.

Secondly, a standard about instructering says "Teachers create supportive environments that engage all learners in purposeful learning and promote respectful classroom interactions." As a result, we can also using the online media source to make our class more vivid and enjoyable. We can post some videos on our blog. They could be our lecture of demonstration of some educational theories, or they could be some lectures of other professors which we consider it helpful to our teaching, or they could even be some fragments of movies or TV series in which we want the students to gain some cultural or academic knowledge.

Third, since we can link our blog with a lot of other blogs, we can let the students know more academic groups through our blog. Also, as another standard about language proficiency is "Teachers understand that language learning is most likely to occur when learners are trying to use the language for genuine communicative purposes", blog is a great platform for the students to post their own findings. It would be their own place to exchange ideas with their peers. Sometimes, it would be even more beneficial that just listening to the teacher.

Last but not least, blog is a good place for distance teaching. The teacher can teach students who live thousands of miles away, using the video casting function and other online tools. It could make our teaching more effective and unlimited. 

Reference
www.freetech4teachers.com/...educators-are-writers.html
www.elearnspace.org/...-media-there-is-no-there-there