Blogging or Microblogging.

 Whether or not we are ready to implement blogging and/or microblogging in our own teaching?

                             

Nowadays the technology plays very important role in our  lives. We can't imagine our life without it. Blogs and Microblogs also have started to become popular among people. People have started to share the ideas, images and interesting and fresh information about everything. It's a pleasure to go through the blogs and find new things for you

Microblogging has become very popular among people. Twitter is one of the microblogging services that enable users to post brief messages and communicate with other users.  It has a huge advantage over usual discussion boards: Tweets consist of

short turns including no more than one or two utterances. Discussion boards usually

require the participants to create and follow up on a thread or to follow a thread and comment.

Twitter is a social network in which the members of a community share their current

activity . Microblogging tools enable users to post short messages

that are distributed within their community. Users can post messages from their

mobile devices, a Web page, from Instant Messengers and desktop clients. The same

channels are used for receiving messages.

Examples for using Twitter with EFL students

 1.Share useful information and resources with students. Reminding students about homework  2.Carry out quick surveys and polls to collect feedback on tasks, projects, etc.

 3.Ongoing storytelling in 140 characters

4. Providing feedback about presentations and classes

5.Receive text messages instead of e-mail messages 

Students be better users of English language. The immediacy of the messages helps the students feel like more of a community Connections, resources, ideas.

As for me as a future English specialist I would not give my Students any assignment with twitter. It would be waste of time. My students would not learn anything from it. Blogging is better than twitter for me. I would give them a homework assignment and ask them to write their ideas and thoughts in their blogs. Getting students involved in blogging can have a real impact on learning and teaching in the classroom. The best way to experiment with student blogging is to just jump in head first. Blogging can help both parents and teacher to see the students knowledge such as: writing comments. They can see how they can use correct spelling, punctuation, how the student understands the lesson and writes comments. Then the teacher can take part to the discussions with the students. Though it is hard to evaluate the students  with their comments and discussions in their blogs. I would look through all their posts, discussions and comments, then I would do my comment under their discussions and then it'd be clear whether they have done my assignments or not, whether they have aswered to all my given questions that i have assigned for their homework.