Blogging workshop for Mandarin teachers

This training workshop on 6th and 7th December 2013 guided teachers through the process of creating a blog and making the best use of blog features to support learning.

Why blog?

Classroom time for language learning is all too limited in today’s varied and busy school curriculum. This workshop proposes an innovative solution for teachers to extend learning hours beyond lesson time: blogging.

About this workshop

Emily Preston (author of Everything Chinese) presented a 1½-day workshop that showed teachers step-by-step how to improve their teaching with a simple blog.

A teaching blog can be used to support practice in each of the four language skills – reading, writing, speaking and listening – through sharing links to existing multimedia resources (e.g. interesting news stories and articles, online videos), setting up activities that the teacher has designed (e.g. assessments, quizzes, questionnaires, learning games), or asking students to record and submit their own work in a password-protected area of the blog (e.g. clips of speaking practice).

The workshop encouraged teachers to make full use of a great many learning resources available online, by collating the links in their own blog site and applying them to their daily teaching practice.

Outcomes

All attendees successfully constructed their own functioning teaching and learning blogs and explored additional features to enhance participation and interactivity. There was much discussion and laughter as the attendees shared their experiences and understanding of how their blogs can enrich their teaching practice.

Quotes from attendees

• “Great workshop. I’ve learned a lot in a short space of time. Intensive but very enjoyable. :)”
• “通过参加工作坊，我知道了很多很有用的网站，并且学会了如何把各种资源链接到自己的博客上，这将给我日后的教学提供很大的便利。”
• “这类培训很有意义，可以让老师们的教学得到更多的技术支撑。”
• “非常实用，对汉语教学极有裨益。”

Click here to visit Emily’s blog Everything Chinese

Bookings for this workshop are now closed.