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The Grandma's Duck Hatches

During this last week I took the first steps towards starting a blog with a group of my students. I've wanted to try it for ages, but never got around to it, for various reasons. I considered it with various classes but always thought that 'it's not quite the right one' or something. If I'm honest, I've been making a variety of excuses, but now I've started, finally.

The class is a group of 7 teenagers aged between 15 and 17, they are in the first year of a two-year FCE preparation course. My personal feeling about exam preparation courses is that they can be extremely demotivating for students if they are concentrated solely on the exam. I know teachers have different ideas and opinions, but I wince when I hear other teachers declaring 'well, what they need is more practice, give them more practice tests, do more timed writing', that would put me off for life. I strongly believe that a balance needs to be struck between exam preparation and actually learning the language, as they are two different things; exam technique is extra, not the main focus of the syllabus. Anyway, I digress...

Partly as a result of my feelings, I wanted to try a blog project to motivate the students, give them the opportunity to practise English outside the classroom and to increase their exposure to real English by getting them involved in activities on the internet.

One 'problem' that I'd been using as an excuse, is the fact that our school doesn't have a computer room, so I couldn't use this route to introduce them to blogging. So, in order to introduce the idea I decided to have a general discussion in the class about blogs. During this chat I found out that the students knew what blogs were, read blogs themselves and a couple of them said they regularly commented. I then asked them to think of some ways in which a blog could be used by the class. They immediately suggested various things: writing articles about their favourite topics, discussing world issues, posting links for interesting articles in English, posting favourite videos from youtube and commenting on them, receiving homework and feedback via the blog and also making connections with other students around the world. I was over the moon! They'd already suggested a load of things that I had thought I would suggest to them and seemed really enthusiastic. Then one of them asked, 'Can we do this?' I hadn't realised, but they had been discussing it all hypothetically. When I told them that this was what I wanted to do, they were made up, a hugely motivating reaction.

In the following lesson, I used the IWB (well, we have e-beam), to show them blogger and some examples of student websites, from my former school IH Braga. I went through the set up process and let them choose the name of the blog and the design, there was some conjecture about the design, before they finally compromised on a horrible brown thing! I'm hoping they can agree to a better thing later.

As for the title, they've chosen the somewhat surreal moniker of 'The Grandma's Duck'. To briefly explain, the balcony of a flat overlooks our classroom window and there's an old woman who lives there, known to the students as 'the Grandma'. She can often be spotted during the lessons, much to the amusement of the students, spying on people in the street in her dressing-gown. The duck reference is from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, part of which I used in a class recently. They have developed a liking for quoting various phrases, including 'A duck!' from the scene where King Arthur helps out as Bedevere attempts to explain to the assembled peasants how they can tell if the accused is indeed a witch. So there you go, they've certainly taken ownership!

The site now exists, it's online, it has a trial post and the potential for a long running Grandma joke. The students' homework is to sign up to google, send me their email, accept the invite to contribute and then write a short introductory post about themselves, without too much personal detail, obviously. So, let's see where it all goes from here.

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