Last week, I had posted my frustrations with blogging, as no one was commenting on my students’ work. Well, Donna sent me a reply and recommended that maybe I connect with a French blog from a school in Victoria, so I did just that. I was impressed with what I saw: an engaged group of French students talking about their passions. I read it, responded and told them about our blog. A couple of days later, we received a comment on our blog from them. My students were elated to see the 1 comment notice. This is making me realize that it is important to read and post comments on other blogs to build relationships and in turn visitors to our own blog. Otherwise, it feels like we are posting to a bulletin board in nowhere land. Donna also recommended that I tweet and email out my class’ blog link. I will do that this week and see what happens.
The Twitter movement at my school is growing. Thanks to Jillian Walkus’ advice, I set up a meeting with the Kwak’wala teacher at our school and shared with her what I was doing with my French class and Twitter. She liked the idea and is going to be following suit. She is creating a stream of Tweets in the Kwak’wala language. She had one concern about certain letters and how to write them on Twitter. I hear that it is possible with an App on the iPhone. Does anyone have any suggestions for this? In my own classroom, my students look forward to our daily tweets. The first thing they mention as they enter class is “wonder what we’ll be tweeting about today?” When I began this activity, I was sending out random questions in French, getting to know my students, but this week I focused the questions and discussions around language elements that we were learning. For instance, we were looking at descriptions of places with prepositional phrases. I set the context as our school and classroom. So using the French they were learning, they wrote descriptions about our school and our classroom both on Twitter and our blog. Check it out by following #phssF or looking at our blog.
