You said “In your case and Jonathan’s case you are not asking your students to do anything that they can’t currently do, after all, they are all fairly ICT competent seeing as they are online students!”

It’s quite the opposite! They are generally first-time explorers of e-learning, so they have very basic ICT skills. In fact, that’s exactly my point, I concentrate on communication within the group and in the outer world of walled LMS. However, tech tools have proven to have great value in their learning process, mainly when our time together is over. For example, I created a ning group for the ones who wanted to keep practicing their English and sharing their findings. Some of them have been great contributors and keep exploring possibilities. No, I didn’t teach them any tech thing there. I just let them discover by themselves how to use Ning and they ask me stuff when they don’t know. The C is still the focus.

As you mentioned the Animoto video should be a springboard for exploration in the L2. There are so many possibilities there…The video just for the sake of it doesn’t have any relevance for us. However, if it’s explored through a pedagogical sound approach, it can impact on learning. I think we agree here that it all depends on our pedagogical purposes and students’ needs and interests.

My setting is EFL, so I know what you mean by the constraints we face. In my case, there are two big ones, time and syllabus. That’s why I guess blogging and podcasting hold so many possibilities as we can use them complementing what is being explored in the classroom and expanding communication to an international audience. And, no, when I’m in my EFL context, I don’t waste precious time teaching technology. I spend it using the tools for connection. That’s why even loving to have individual blogs for my students, most of my blogs are class blogs to make students’ lives easier and to profit the most out of our language learning experience. And, if you consider, for example, an educator with many classes, there’s no way he could manage to keep track of tons of individual blogs. It’s a matter of being effective and productive in your teaching practices. There needs to be room for flexibility and adaptation.

As for the writingmatrix, I love its concept and have been applying it in other areas of my own learning and connecting with others. I think it’s strong in terms of finding others to connect, though we still need to work on ways to keep the conversations flowing through comments. A challenge!

I really like the theme of your students’ blog posts. I love the reflective nature of them and the way that your students use the blog to examine their university / college colleagues. It seems that through this activity they also look again at themselves. This is a really great activity and shows some really nice task design. I must try that out with some of my students as I love reflective lessons.

What you say about tagging with “Writingmatrix” is a great point you know too Ronaldo. Looking at the later, more reflective posts your students have written, I noticed almost none of them have received any comments from readers, whereas the first posts about dream holidays had several comments on each post. Seeing as comments are such a wonderful, interactive part of blogging, I’d definitely agree that you were right to tell your students to add tags for the benefit of Technorati. It seems to have worked for your students, even if they didn’t know (and maybe even didn’t need to know?) why they were tagging their posts.

Nathàlia’s video is great as well. I love the fact that it is a nice personal reminder for her of a trip that obviously seemed to mean a lot to her. I still wonder though if this is only really a springboard for further discussion. What would be great now would be to see her classroom colleagues posting a few questions to her about her video as comments to the blog post. There’s such a good opportunity for communication just waiting to be grabbed! Do let me know if you have any success Ronaldo. I’d love to know how things progress!

Thanks for dropping by. Take care and all the best,

Seth