Using blogs with students in a language learning classroom is a great way to engage students and meet state and national academic standards at the same time. The ACTFL National Standards for Foreign Language Learning, for example, emphasize the importance of using language for Communication as well as making Connections with other content areas, and blogs can help you do both of those things!
When students read blogs that already exist on the internet, they have the opportunity to obtain new information and understand and interpret written language on a variety of topics. By commenting on those blogs, or creating a blog of their own, they can engage in conversations, provide information, express their own thoughts and emotions, and present information in a written form. As their skill with the language develops, students can also share with the class the kinds of things they have been reading about on blogs or use a blog they have written as a platform to practice speaking and presentational skills. All of those things come straight from the ACTFL Communication standard!
One of the great things about blogs is that anyone can write one. That means there are tons of them out there on just about any topic. This would give students the opportunity to seek out and read blogs that align with their interests, of course, but it also provides an easy way to connect language learning with other content areas.
While beginning level language learners might not be up to the challenge of sorting through blogs in another language and finding something that's written at a level they can comprehend, as teachers, we can find a few that correspond to the content we want to highlight and provide vocabulary scaffolding and organize activities in response to those blogs that will still allow students to engage with authentic materials in the target language. There are also blogs and website out there that are created specifically for English Language Learners, which could be a great asset in an ESL classroom.
If you are teaching a language other than English and have any professional connections to teachers in a country where that language is spoken, it could be fun to try to coordinate parallel blogging, where students in both countries/classes write on the same topic each week and could read and comment on each others blogs. Something like that could be particularly useful for developing a more nuanced approach to a lot of the cultural discussions that develop in foreign language classrooms--because Culture is another ACTFL standard. For example, instead of reading in a textbook that Germans eat bread and cheese for breakfast or have joghurt and muesli, while U.S. Americans eat sugary cereals with milk, you could both have your students blog about what they eat and give them the opportunity to see the variety that exists within countries and cultures--and interact by commenting and asking each other questions.
Finding other teacher bloggers who write about their teaching experience and post thoughtful questions and suggestions for classroom activities would, of course, also help me to use blogs for my own professional development. As in any field, our best resources are often our peers, and the internet makes it possible for us to connect with teachers all around the world. While we may not be able to do exactly the same things in our classrooms that other teachers do in theirs, we can certainly share ideas and borrow concepts from each other to implement in our own ways with our students.
