Creating Personal Spanish Blogs

Here is a collection of thoughts and reflections on my experience creating personal Spanish blogs with my high school intermediate and beginner Spanish students. I would love to hear additional tips, ideas, experiences, and lessons learned from anyone who has done blogging in the foreign language classroom or otherwise. I plan on adding to this entry as the project continues.


Goal: To improve students’ reading and writing skills in Spanish.

·      To provide opportunities for authentic communication in target language

·      To provide opportunities for students to interact with native speakers

·      To emulate characteristics of an immersion language learning experience using web 2.0

Blogging platform?
I used Blogger because I was familiar with it and it is free, widely used, and relatively simple to set up. It requires a bit of up front time investment getting students to follow each other's blogs and add subscription links but it has worked well.

Set-up?
I would recommend spending a class period in the computer lab with an LCD projector walking the students through the creation of their own blog including the following extras:

·      Get the gadget “Subscription Links” (layout/add gadget)

·      Get the gadget “Labels” (layout/add gadget)

·      Set comments to allow anyone to comment (settings/comments)

·      Remove the word verification for comments (settings/comments)

·      If students use e-mail, have them get comment notification by e-mail (settings/comments)

Alternatives?
You may decide that to begin with, it may serve your students better to have one class blog where all students are able to write posts and comments on the same blog. You can set this up under (settings/permissions) although I think that there is a maximum of 10 authors allowed.

What else?
Students need to learn how to access and use their Google Reader so that they find out immediately when someone has posted or commented. If they don’t use this and have subscriptions to all their classmates’ blog posts AND comments, then it is unlikely that they will be active bloggers.

Assessment?
I used the following rubric to grade the first 6 weeks of blogging. The criteria for grading are BLOG USAGE / PROGRESS & IMPROVEMENT / PERSONAL EXPRESSION / QUALITY OF SPANISH. In the future I would place more weight on BLOG USAGE so that students are motivated first and foremost to use the blog. I am assigning 4 required blog posts with specified topics/objectives (about every other week) and then students are expected to write personal (unassigned) posts regularly. 

Management?
Just as it is for anyone who blogs, getting comments is the biggest motivator for students to write frequently. As the teacher, you are charged with giving timely, personalized, and motivating comments to pull students into the habit of checking their reader for now posts and new comments. This is time-consuming but worth it. I am still in this beginning stage so I do not know about the time commitment of long-term blog management.


Other ideas?
Create BEST BLOG badges and send them to the most creative blog or the most prolific blogger.
Write about a particularly interesting or thoughtful post of one of your student’s thereby directing traffic to their blog.  (Like real bloggers).

Brainstorming ideas for required blog posts?

·      Introduce yourself to the world

·      Post your favorite YouTube video and tell why you like it

·      Write your daily routine

·      Describe a time when you got sick

·      Do one of those 25 question things that goes around FaceBook

·      Write about your plans for the summer

·      Rate your town on a scale of 0 to 10 and explain why you gave that rating (classmates may have other ideas about how they would rate the town)

Ultimate goal / next step:
Find Spanish students in other countries who want to be blog amigos.
Make connections with native Spanish-speaking students with whom we can have blog-exchanges.

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If you have any ideas or questions, please leave a comment.