06.28.07
Initial Reflections
I would imagine that students will be very enthusiastic to apply this to their study of foreign languages since I have often heard them talking about participating in blogs on their own. I believe that blogs will be useful in both my advanced composition course and the literature course that I will be teaching this coming fall. I have heard colleagues from other institutions say that they have had great discussions with students in literature courses. I think that the blogs will be useful to the composition course because students will be able to more regularly practice their writing and feel less pressure to write long, polished prose pieces.
I would like to pose a question to those with experience–Are there types of assignments/postings that work better? Does anyone have examples of a few particular assignments that have worked well? Do the initial postings need to be framed in a certain way in order to encourage more thoughtful responses? How about time management for the assignments? I will be curious to hear about assessment as well.
On a related note to assessment, there has been debate in my department about technology and academic integrity and I was wondering what position others take on spell checkers and grammar checkers at early stages of laguage aquisition. Should beginning and emerging intermediate proficient L2 students regularly use these devices?