Blogs as a tool for teaching English

During the last scholastic year, St Monica School, Gzira was chosen to participate in a pilot project undertaking by the European Centre for Modern Languages concerning the use of blogs in the teaching of English.

It was a highly successful venture and there have been a lot of positive repercussions. Our representative attended the first meeting in Graz, Austria, for the briefing sessions. The representative was accompanying Mario Camilleri, who is the project coordinator, and Valerie Sollars, a project team member.

Dealing with a variety of aspects of language education, these projects are organised for the centre by international teams of experts, such as Dr Camilleri and Dr Sollars. They are primarily targeted at teacher trainers, researchers and key multipliers in the language field. They aim at raising awareness, providing training and facilitating networks of mutual encouragement and support.

In December 2004, the organising team of the ECML project on Web Journals in Language Education (Blogs) met in Graz, Austria, together with the four teachers involved in the piloting phase. Schools from Malta, the Czech Republic and Poland were represented.

Our representative was Marilyn Mangion, a teacher of English at our school who is working on the project with Form 3 students. During the session in Graz the whole team enjoyed the experience of being exposed to a cocktail of five working languages.

One of the main aims of this project is to develop a web-logging tool with specific features tailored to the needs of the foreign language-learning environment. With great anticipation, this tool was unveiled and then road-tested by all members of the group, including our school. It promised to be simple to use and apply in the classroom and was to provide an effective platform for collaboration between students from the different pilot schools.

Specific aims of the project include designing and implementing a second generation XML-based content-management platform which will enable students to publish an online journal without requiring any technical know-how. This publishing tool will incorporate features to promote collaborative writing by enabling students to cross reference their writing with that of other students in the same community, annotating and commenting their and other's writings, and linking to sites of common interest. Class-management and editorial features will also be implemented to enable teachers to monitor and (if so desired) exert editorial control over their students' published writing.

The project is twin-tracked, one for students of French and the other for students of English. Teachers from each track met together to explore common themes and ideas for collaboration that might be explored by their students. They also seized the opportunity to post to their own web-logs, recognising the importance of modelling the writing process to their students. We are participating in English language.

The pilot phase was implemented between January and mid-April of last year. The organising team of the ECML Web Journals in Language Education (Blogs) project met again in Graz in June. The dual emphasis was on evaluating the pilot phase of the project and on preparing its implementation phase commencing with a four-day workshop in November. The implementation phase includes a large number of participants besides the first four of the piloting phase.

From an evaluative viewpoint the web-logging software performed admirably during the pilot phase and "faded into the background" as all good software should, allowing the teachers and students to concentrate on posting and commenting. Students and teachers were asked to fill in questionnaires and the results were overwhelmingly positive. Two of the teachers from the piloting phase, one of them Mrs Mangion, were present during the full workshop in November to provide their peers with their own practical experience and insights of blogging.

Mrs Mangion explained how blogs or web-logs are really web journals which combine a personal web page and an online diary using a platform purposely designed for use in the language classroom. Journal writing has always been a favourite tool of language teachers. Because of its public nature, the blog goes a step further: it gives journal writing a social, collaborative and intercultural dimension. This in its turn lessens the gap between what is going on inside and outside the school because web-logging is a revolutionary tool both to express an opinion and to respond to an opinion. Thus, by customising this tool for the use of creative writing one is giving a sense of purpose for writing.

At school the audience for a student's piece of work normally consists of two persons, the student and the teacher. With web-logs a bigger audience is created because anyone may browse through and read the postings although only the participants can add and edit. The main motivation for writing is the fact that the student knows that he/she has a real audience. Communities of bloggers not only read but also comment on each others postings and other web content.

The teacher may also use this tool to promote collaborative writing. Our students from Form 3 were collaborating with Polish students. The teacher motivated the students by giving them guidelines, then monitored (checked and corrected) their postings. Thus, while learning to correct their mistakes, the students were assured that their piece of writing was interesting and up to standard.

By the end of the four-day event in November, participants from all the countries involved were fully equipped to start reaping the benefits of using web-logs with their students. With representatives from up to 33 nations involved in the implementation phase of this project, the potential for collaboration and inter-cultural writing is immense. A body of writings created by students during the course of the project using this collaborative publishing platform will ensue, in the form of a CD with an accompanying brochure.

Our school was very pleased to participate in the piloting phase and the students enjoyed it so much that they were looking forward to go on participating in the actual implementation phase. This was confirmed when the work resumed. The students' interest and motivation are so gratifying to us as educators that there is no doubt as regards the benefit of such ICT related tools as blogs in language teaching.

The author is assistant head at St Monica School in Gzira.