Blogging for English as a second language (ESL), with "intro to blogger" (visual guide)

Kate M, one of the brilliant English as a second language (ESL) teachers at PRACE is thinking about using a blog to connect with her students. We talked about a few different ways to approach the idea:

(NB: You can find these ideas also in a larger document over here at google docs.)

• Start with a single blog in broadcast mode. Put the teaching and learning activities up and send students to read or listen there. Dale Pobega's ESL Club is a great example of this.
• Embed a video into one post, with an activity where students post a reply via the comment form - Kate's doing recipes and cooking in the class, so she thought it would be good to embed video from one of the SBS cooking shows.
• When you start, you can make commenting open to any anonymous visitors, to save students from having to log in. 
• (Later on, you could get them to sign in to comment.)
• As you get more confident, you could add a form under the video where students answer questions and you get the feedback automatically (eg using google forms).
  
  (..more after the break, including the PDF document..)
  

Email with students - Help File!!

I wrote before how Chris Mooney was trialling some email activities with her English as a second language (ESL) group. And i'd promised to make an easy-to-read visual guide to creating a google / gmail account.

So here it is:

• Link to the PDF document in google docs 
• (..where you can download and print a copy - i've printed it in booklet form on A3 paper).
• The guide is licensed creative commons (cc-nc-sa)
• feedback very welcome. 

I tried to embed the file directly here: it works, but then the page loads directly on the embedded file every time, instead of at the top of the page. So, dis-embedding now.