The word blog is short for weblog. A weblog is an online journal or diary. It consists of a chronological list of entries or posts. Every blog entry is made up of two basic parts: a tittle and the text. The people who are allowed to contribute to the blog are called team members. Blogs offer many opportunities to language teachers because they are easy to set up and operate and can be an effective way of communicating with learners outside lesson time. They also allow the learner the opportunity to do extra work. If classroom time is limited, you can use a blog to make vocabulary available to learners before the lesson. A blog can have a mailing list. This means that when you post a new entry, it is emailed to everyone on the list. The use of hyperlinks in blogs can inject an element of interactivity. Pictures and diagrams are vey useful in language teaching and can be incorporated into blog entries. Using a blog takes the pressure off you to finish the lesson with a detailed and legible feedback sheet, but also makes sure that the feedback is available to your learners before the start of the next lesson. Using a blog can establish good practices of learner autonomy. Learners have to be proactive in accessing the information you have posted to the blog and following the links to online resources. Learners can provide feedback on the blog entry. They can add their own ideas, thoughts, vocabulary, etc. You can create personalized exercises that they can complete as self- study or homework. The best kind of exercises to place on a blog involve texts. These can be used to create a gap- fill exercise, or you can remove elements of the text such as articles or auxiliary words. Vocabulary can be substituted or mixed up. Paragraphs can be mixed up, or learners can be asked to match headings to paragraphs.
A wiki is a website on which the pages can be edited by the users, as well as the creator of the website. The users can change the content by adding or removing information or editing the existing content. One of the most powerful benefits of using wikis in language learning is as a collaborative tool. One of the interesting features of wikis is that they blur the distinction between author and audience. Rather than somebody owning a document, its composition becomes a joint effort. A wiki could allow your class to share notes. The wiki could be a place where learners communicate with each other outside lessons, replicating some of the benefits of a VLE. There are a number of exciting activities which can be done using wikis. One idea called "branching story" taps into the imagination of learners. You start the story with an introduction, then leave the protagonist of the story with three choices. By clicking on one of the options, the learner is taken to a new page in the wiki. The learner then becomes the writer, and he or she continues the story. Activities using wikies involve ceding a degree of control to the learners. Instances of malicious use of wikis seem to be rare.
Chapter 9 Creating and using your own resources, Blended Learning, Pete Sharma and Barney Barret (2007)
Chapter 12 Preparing for the future, How to teach English with technology, Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly (2007)
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