Blogging in Venezuelan municipal schools

Since last March 2006, a group of Venezuelan teachers from municipal schools in Chacao started using blogs to publish their web-based lessons. This was part of a venture project between the British Council Venezuela and the Chacao Municipality to train EFL teachers to integrate ICT into the language classroom. Two (2) teachers from Unidad Educativa Andrés Bello and one (1) from Juan de Dios Guanche participated in this pilot project. It was divided into two phases. 

Phase I, teachers participated in a workshop given in the British Council premises. They became familiar with some ICT tools and learned how to design web-based lessons using Internet. After this, teachers gave a session with some of their students (about 6) showing what they had learned in the British Council lab. Next, teachers had a meeting with the teacher trainer, received feedback and planned the second phase of the project: using ICT with their students in each of their school labs. During this phase, blogs became the ICT tool of choice because of its effectiveness and efficiency to provide students extra-practice in the school lab. Lab sessions were held for an hour (45 minutes) on a weekly basis in the school labs and about 17 students from each school participated in this part of the project. Teachers received technical/pedagogical support from British Council teacher trainer on-line and FtF all along this phase.
I will briefly describe the steps followed to design a web-based lesson using blogs in this pilot project. First, let's start with a definition of blogs.

What’s a blog?

According to Will Richardson (2006): “…a Weblog is an easily created, easily updateable Website that allows an author (or authors) to publish instantly to the Internet from any Internet connection.”

To understand what a blog is and its power as an ICT tool, I will compare it with an EFL printed book. In a blog, the web-based lesson is a single entry where you have the activities you want your students to do whereas a lesson, in a printed book, is comprised of several pages. Activities, in the blog, have hyperlinks that take your students to other websites or exercises you have designed yourself. That is, activities are no presented in a linear fashion as in a printed book. Both the printed book and the blog class can have pictures, illustrations and graphics. The only difference is that in the blog you can choose images from the web (e.g. Google images) or design/edit them yourself (e.g. Photoshop). Furthermore, while in a printed book, lessons are organized in an orderly fashion (lesson 1 to 12), in the class blog lessons can be archived monthly , generally, in a chronological reversed order. Also, students cannot write comments about a lesson in their printed books . In the class blog, students can (interactivity). Only a limited audience have access to the printed book: the student himself/herself, teacher and parents from a certain school. The blog can be accessed by anybody or restricted to other students/teachers/parents from other schools around the world. Books can get lost or deteriorated easily. Blogs do not.

Blogs can be used as reflective journals, class or shared blogs (Richardson, 2006). For this project, we used the class blog.

Where did teachers start their class blogs?

There are several sites that can host a class blog for free: Blogger, Edublog, Motime, Wordpress among others. For the project we are about to describe, we chose Blogger. These were the steps teachers followed to set up a Blogger account:

1. They got a Blogger account
2. Once they had their account, they clicked on “New post” in the dashboard and explored how they could add content to blogs. The only IT skills they needed to use Blogger were those required for e-mailing.
3. After exploring and learning how to post entries, they got ready to design their web-based lesson! To design the first web-based lessons, they needed the teacher trainer technical support. To do this the teacher trainer devoted about 3 hours per teacher on a weekly basis. Two hours FtF and one on-line.

Which IT skills teachers needed to design their web-based lessons in a blog?

For this project, the class blog was chosen to post the teachers' web-based lessons. To do that, they needed the following Basic IT skills: searching, uploading, using authoring software

What did teachers have to take into account to design their web-based lesson?

They should keep in mind that the web-based lesson...
1. reinforces a lesson already taught in the classroom (e.g. Animals, colours, numbers, etc.)
2. is based on tasks (Check material from teacher training session).
3. has three basic stages: pre-task (warming up); task; post-task (follow-up)

Besides, before the class, they should test the lesson themselves or asked a colleague/ teacher trainer to make sure instructions were clear and links worked.

If they designed activities for their online lessons using Hot potatoes, they should upload them to a hosting free online service like Geocities. It worked as a repository for all the materials they designed.

What was the web-based lesson session like?

1. The teacher asked students to go to Google and type Blogger. Next, they should click on the link for Blogger. Once they had done that, they should write in the Blogger search engine the name of the blog (e.g. ABsexto, Ictleonela).
2. Students clicked on the link provided by search engine.
3. Students started to work the lesson on their own or in pairs. The teacher only helped when they students called him/her out or raised their hands.
4. At the end of the session, students wrote comments about the lesson.

P.S. A training session for students should be planned before leaving students to their own devices.

Which were the results of this pilot project using class blogs?

Students 1) got engaged; 2) became aware of things they were learning (metacognition); 3) developed IT skills (life-long skills); 4) worked at their own pace; 5) became in charge of their own learning. On the other hand, teachers 1) were nicely surprised with their students' attitude towards learning English; 2) realized students' behavior was less disruptive; 3) developed IT skills; 4) were in tune with the way their students are learning outside the classroom.

Class blogs from municipal schools in Chacao

Prof. Maral

6th graders

Unidad Educativa Andrés Bello

ABsexto

Prof. Leonela González
6th graders
Unidad Educativa Juan de Dios Guanche
ICTleonela

Prof. Oenis Hernández
7th graders
Unidad Educativa Juan de Dios Guanche
ICToenis

What's ahead?

This project will be carried on by the British Council and the Municipality of Chacao training more teachers to integrate ICT into the language classroom during the school year 2006-2007.

Reference:
Richardson, Will (2006). Blogs, wikis and podcasts. Corwin Press. California.

Types of tasks for web-based lessons

There are several ways of grouping task-based activities. For example, Willis (1996) groups them into:  

A. Listing  
B. Ordering 
C. Comparing  
D. Problem solving  
E. Sharing personal experiences 
F. Creative tasks 

Pica, Kanagy and Falodun (1993) classify these activities according to the type of interaction:
 
A. Jigsaw tasks c Information gaps tasks c Problem-solving tasks  
B. Decision-making tasks c Opinion exchange tasks. 

According to Richards & Rodgers (2002), they can also be classified into: one-way to two-way tasks, convergent or divergent, collaborative or competitive, single or multiple outcomes, concrete or abstract language, simple or complex processing, simple or complex language, reality based or not-reality based. 

For the web-based lesson suggested in this ICT-blog, we will use Willis’s classification (1996). For each type of task , Willis gives the outcome, processes involved, starting points and follow-up tasks. 

Check the summary chart of Willis’s tasks. You can use it as guide to plan your activities for your web based lesson. Remember that the main focus of a task based approach is meaning and communication. 

If you want to do some language exercises (e.g. grammar), you can do that after the follow up activity focusing on the problems students had while doing their tasks during the lesson (Harmer, 2002) .

Reference:

* Willis, J. (1996). A Framework for Task-Based Learning. (Longman Handbooks for Language Teachers). Addison Wesley Publishing Company. 
* Pica, T., R. Kanagy, and J. Falodun (1993). Choosing and using communicative tasks for second language instruction. In G. Crookes and S. 
* Gass (eds.), Tasks and Language learning: Integrating theory and practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 9-34 * Richards, J. and Rodgers, T. (2002). Approaches and methods in language teaching. Cambridge University Press. * Harmer, J. (2002). The practice of English language teaching. Longman.

Web-based lesson design process

How would I go about designing a web-based lesson? 

First, I would focus on the topic or topics the unit from the book has got. So for example, let’s say I choose unit 5 from Super Goal (Manuel Dos Santos, 2001). The title of the unit is: Is there any pizza? The grammar points are: coun –noncount nouns; some & any; and would like. I find this unit in the book and scan the content to identify the topic(s) where functions and linguistic aspects are embedded. In this unit, we have two topics: food & restaurants I will choose as my web-based lesson focus: food . 

What do I do next? 

Well, I start finding sites related to this topic. I can do one of the following things when searching information about it: 

Option 1. I can type in the Google search engine the word “Food”. It will retrieve a list of sites with broad topics related to food. I’d check the first link since it is the most visited site and this may mean it has got interesting information (It’s not always like that, though).  

Option 2: If I want a game or quiz, I would type: “food+games” or “food+quiz” or “food+interactive” and choose one my students may like and enjoy.  

Option3: If I want a sound (and do not want to have copyright problems), I could type: “food+podcast”. For a video, you can type: “food+videocast”. Even though, you can download this audios or videos for free to your computer, it’d be great if you acknowledge the people who produce them by mentioning them in your material as reference or sending a letter to them and letting them know how useful the sound or video has been for your class. 

Now, let’s pretend I went for option 2 and found a game related to food: 

http://www.glasgows.co.uk/fsa_interactives/PltLoad.swf

This game will be my inspiration to start designing my web-based lesson. Remember that we will follow a task-based approach to design our activities for this lesson. So I will divide the whole process into: pre-task, task and follow up activities.  

PRE-TASK 
The pre-task could be a brainstorming activity, questions, a picture, a short text related to something they have previously seen or practiced in the classroom. Remember we are recycling or reinforcing, NOT introducing new content!! Ok. Having made that clear, let’s say I go for a picture. So I go to Google images and find one that I could use for my students to identify words related to food. This is site is: http://www.yankeetavern.com/menu%20pgs/pg%203.jpg It was the best I could find. We will not always find the perfect thing on the net because people don’t design their sites thinking about our pedagogical needs (unless it is an EFL site) but we can always ADAPT! …What I'm trying to say is that we don’t have to spend hours finding the perfect site…It should be reasonably sound for our main purpose: recycling and exposing our students to language and more authentic material that will lead them to do things (writing, listening, speaking, reading) meaningfully. Ok…Having found this picture, I will design the following activities:  

1) Students will match with the picture with a list of words related to food with a classmate. 
2) Students classify the words from the list into “Good for my health”, “Not so good” or “Can live without it. 
3) Students to compare their answers (communication – sharing tastes in food) 
 
TASK 
The task activity can be started by asking students: “GO TO”….That is, by visiting the site we chose for this part of the lesson…For the task, you can choose activities like scanning, making comparisons, solving a problem, etc. For this material about food, I ask students to  

1) go to: http://www.glasgows.co.uk/fsa_interactives/PltLoad.swf

2) play the game. 

3) read the suggestions given after the game and correct the ones they have in the external material. 

4) play the game again and organize the food into things they eat little, some or a lot…As you can see we are dealing with grammar but within a context…I try not to shoo students away by writing “Classify food using expressions of quantity” in my task-based activity  

5) share this information with their classmates (communication again). 

FOLLOW UP 
The follow up activity (activities to consolidate what students did from the previous activities in the web-based lesson) can be a writing or speaking activity (a letter, dialogues, role plays). For my lesson, I ask students to write about a food group (which is what they have in the game) and e-mail the composition to their teacher. Check: Food (external material) and a graphic representing the web-based design process.