Blog of the Week #3

Another week has passed and it is time to announce my winners of week 3. Let's see...

I want to start with Nida Arıcan's Blog. Again, it is a very simple blog with no widgets or gadgets at all. However, she has succeeded in getting her students' attention with only two posts. Using the movie "Signs" in her post together with her Crop Circles post generated some real language use without academic concerns. Finding a common interest of your students is one way to get their attention in your blog. Hope they keep on writing with you, Nida.

The next one is Gonca Ünsalan's Blog. Especially her TGIF post where she shares some personal information about herself. This kind of information attracts the students' attention and we see that it has worked here as well. Combining this strategy with music and a question about the students' choice is also cleverly handled. Don't stop, keep rockin' B27 Gonca.

The next blog that I have chosen is Gonca Türsoy's blog. This is a good example for teachers who wholeheartedly try to get their students' attention by posting material that has the potential to attract attention. Her last post is really funny and ironic in the way it shows how students might be perceiving blogs. I hope she won't lose interest and give up. Keep on blogging Gonca...

Blog of the Week #2

This week I have four blogs of the week. The reason why I have four is that each one has a different appeal. Let's take a look at them:





Blog of the Week: Effort: Birgül Kasap's Class Blog
The moment you take a look at her blog you can see that she has spent a lot of time. She has different tabs at the top of her page which help you navigate to different pages and those pages are filled with valuable information. This must have taken a lot of time and I believe she should be credited for that effort.

Blog of the Week: Less is More: Merve Sağlar, Şenay Soylu, Pelin Yurtyapan

I have chosen these blogs because of their simple layout and clever ways to stimulate student comments. I believe that less is more and that using all those widgets is just tiring to the eye. I would suggest not using 3rd party widgets because they also include Google ads which I find unnecessary for a class blog (unless you get 45.000 hits a day!). Here they are:

Merve Sağlar:

She has only two posts so far but already 10 comments for her 1st post. That is something for a C56 class.

Şenay Soylu:

Her "What is the message of this song" post not only started a little discussion about world issues but also stimulated real situation language use ("...you still dont accept me on facebook ? :D why?"), which what we are actually after.

Pelin Yurtyapan

Pelin achieved the same with her "Birds" post, where she embedded a Pixar video and asked what the birds were talking about. This made the students write funny conversations to a funny animation. (You should watch it if you haven't seen it yet)

That's it for this week.
Keep blogging...