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..)
  
• Further down the track, you might get students to work in small groups to make their own post, with a review or a narrative. 
• Or you could post audio recordings from presentations or interviews in class. 
• If the students really take to it, they could set up individual or small group blogs of their own later on. (Yes that is a Big IF.)

So the upshot is that i've started making another visual guide, a how-to document introducing you to "the new" blogger-dot-com. You'll only find the most basic of instructions in this first draft, ie how to make a new post:

• Grab your copy of the first draft here (link) if you like (pdf via google docs). 

What else needs to go in the second draft of the document? Other skills might include how to:

• adjust the layout, adding various gadgets or changing the theme
• embed video into a post
• add images to your post (for example if you have creative commons licensed images from flickr)

What skills would you like to see added to the document?