The Beginning of Change

Three months have passed and not a single word has been posted in my blog! Honestly; I’m ashamed of myself… I may come out with excuses to justify my blogging inertia, but I’m afraid, I’d be the first one to doubt their credibility. Procrastination is perhaps the real cause behind my being away for so long from blogging. I’m a BIGGG Procrastinator… It is a fact and I can’t help it. I even think that procrastination is an integral part of my genetic make-up!!!

I did write in my last post that I would consider my graduation as my ticket to bring change into my classes. To some extent, I did. I created three blogs for the three levels and six classes I’m teaching this year. Introducing this tech novelty has been much appreciated by my students despite the confusion they had in the beginning. To clear up the confusion, I had to bring the data show, my laptop and a 3G usb modem to the classroom in order to show them live how to proceed. I thought this would work perfectly fine. It did work, but not in a ”perfectly fine” manner. Still some students came to me saying the link I gave them wasn’t working. In fact, the problem was simply they didn’t type the link correctly. Spelling is the last thing my students ,and probably most of today’s students, would care about. But, in the web, misspelling addresses usually leads navigators to wrong destinations. Well, I ceased that opportunity to re-draw their attention to the gravity of spelling errors and their consequential side-effects they have on one’s web-searching.

I haven’t limited the use of blogs to learning English only. I knew this would attract a very limited number of students. To lure most of them into learning through this new tool, I thought of including links to lessons, exercises and activities that cover most of their school subjects ( Arabic, French, Physics, Philosophy ... ). The results were unexpectedly satisfactory. Some students even asked me to post more links. What they particularly like are the ESL video quizzes I embedded in their blogs.

However, I have to admit they haven’t posted any comments for the past two months. It’s a bit discouraging and demotivating, but when it comes to students, one should show more patience. Two days ago, while checking the Common Core (K- 10 grade) blog, I was happily surprised to see four comments posted by my students. Given where I work and the kind of students I have, I consider that an achievement. Yet, I’m looking forward to reading more of their reactions.