(photo source)
Hi everyone!
Two weeks ago I started working on a blog for my English course, and I immediately found this idea very interesting and stimulating. Before taking part in this project, I knew how to develop a blog, because I already have one with two friends of mine. This helped me not only writing my posts and my comments, but also creating my own blog, in which I’m writing now.
During the first three years at the university I used an online programme (Firstclass) which enabled students and professors to join and work together through chatrooms, forums and online conferences. However, I think that working on a course blog and on our blogs is more exciting, because we can use an easy, creative tool to improve our English. A blog is a website which doesn’t require particular skills or programming language, so anyone could have one. Moreover, we can increase our creativity, because we can do whatever we want, whenever we want. For example, we can make our blog more interesting or eye-catching by adding links and pictures in the posts or in the sidebars. The most important characteristic which I noticed in the course blog is that communication and interaction prove very easy among students through the comments, and this can influence our language learning in a positive way. We can suggest others some useful websites, and we can learn how to write informal texts by reading many messages, which can be more or less colloquial, and by writing posts and comments in a conversational way. This is an important aim because I know how to write an essay in English, but I’m not very experienced in writing informal texts in English, even though I had already taken part in forums and chatrooms. I also have to point out that even though I can’t attend the blogging course (I do the e-tivities at home), the tasks and the purposes explained in the course blog are always simple and clear.
The only two negative aspects I noticed regard the number of people involved in the course, and the groups into which we have been divided. First of all, I think that it is a little bit difficult to work with many people, but this is a frequent problem at our university: there are always so many students attending courses!! Moreover, not all the people in every group participate in the blog in the same way, so interaction among students can be sometimes difficult. Anyway, I'm convinced that we can solve these problems all together!
What do you think about my impressions?
See you!
Giovanna
