Theresa Almeida d'Eca

Beginner ESL blog with younger school students, which is a mix of a web page and a blog.

Aaron Campbell's Weblogs for Use with ESL Classes inspired Thereas to use blogs with 3rd year ESL students. Wanted to generate a two way communications - student to teacher and teacher to student. Another key factor was to give students a way to express their own voice.

Younger kids were involved, so theresa paid attention to the blog look to make it attractive to them. Topics where chosen carefully to be sure that the topic would be of interest to the students and only English was allowed on the blog.

Online exercises where also used from time to time. See examples at:

http://www.malhatlantica.pt/teresadeca/school/fwe5-dec03.htm

A project related to bringing different cultures together involved an exchange between Portuguese and Polish speaking students. They used text and voice messaging in the project. They used Handybits for voice recording. http://www.handybits.com

Theresa also introduced photo stories.

Half of the students did not have the technology to do this at home, so Theresa used a combination of high and low tech by giving them paper based copies of the exchanges through email on the blog.

The blog URL is http://www.malhatlantica.pt/teresadeca/school/fun-with-english5.htm

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