Week 1 - Getting started

I started using internet in 1999 (when I was an architect) and blogging and podcasting are not really new to me. I have been using these tools for some years to enrich my own knowledge and experience, limited to reading blogs and listening to podcasts available on the internet. I never used them for teaching anyone or sharing any of my own experiences as an ESL teacher. This means I never wrote anything really useful through blogging, though I did try, twice. I created two blogs on ‘blogger’ about more than a year ago, but wrote only one welcome post on each of them, not being able to decide what to write next. After that I became disinterested in blogging.

So before joining this course I knew what a blog was and how to create one for myself and even how it could be useful for me and my students. But somehow I could not make it really useful in making my teaching more effective or realizing my ambition of becoming an online English teacher.

And while I write this first post for my ‘Web Skills’ blog I am feeling very excited at the prospect of  renewal of my lost enthusiasm for blogging. The course requires me to update my blog every week and that will give me enough confidence to write, before the end of the course. In fact, I am feeling pretty confident right now even though I haven’t finished writing my first post. And now I am thinking about adding new posts to my existing blogs as well. Wow! That feels great.

Well, this time, while creating the blog, I learnt a lot about the settings and templates. I liked the way we can choose who can comment on our post and how we can change the settings as per our wishes. Also the ‘Stats’ and ‘Earnings’ links are interesting. But the most important things that I have learnt is how blogging is being used by our course coordinators as a very useful tool for creating an interactive learning environment for us on the web, where we will be able to interact with each other as classmates during the course of our studies and share our experiences with each other and with anyone else in the world we like, besides preparing us for the future generation of English learners.

Thanks.