Week 1: Blogging

 Welcome to my ICT in TESOL blog!

My previous blog for the Warwick Skills Portfolio Award (2010)

My personal story as a blogger

I have always wanted to become a professional blogger. My first experience of blogging was during my undergraduate year for the Warwick Skills Portfolio Awards in 2010. In retrospect, the programme served as a good introductory course to the world of blogging for me. However, I realised that I was motivated to keep writing and updating my blog mostly because I wanted the award and once I have successfully completed the course, I also consequently stopped from writing in Kamal’s Chronicle any longer. My second realisation was that my previous blog was also very simple and perhaps rather ‘wordy’. Therefore, I hope that the ICT module that I am taking this year will help me gain some new knowledge on ICT in TESOL as well as helping me to grow and improve myself as a blogger.

Some interesting blogs on ELT

In my first seminar, Tilly - my ICT lecturer, introduced some interesting blogs pertaining to the field of ELT to us. In this entry, I would like to focus on Scott Thornbury’s blog: An A-Z of ELT and share some of my own opinions about his ELT blog.

Scott Thornbury [Source: scottthornbury.com] 

The first thing that I find interesting about his blog is his creative idea of curating his blog entries in an alphabetical order. By arranging them alphabetically, it helps the readers to navigate and search for a particular topic that they might be interested in. His blog also has a simple and clean layout which helps the readers to focus on their reading, without any advertisement which can be a major distraction to some readers.

An A to Z of ELT 

Another interesting aspect of Scott’s blog that I find useful is the comment section. The comment section provides the interactive aspect for this blog. It allows his reader to post their opinion about the topic that they have read about. They can also ask questions directly to Scott which he will answer! Consequently, the comment section has become an important and insightful feature of the blog as it serves as a communicative platform between the writer and the readers to interact with each other. 

The comment section allows the readers to interact with the writer.

If you are an English language teacher or a teacher educator like me, here are several other blogs that I personally think are interesting and worth visiting: ICT in ELT Jo Gakonga, Jason Anderson, Cecilia Nobre ELT blog and Russel Stannard ELT Teacher’s Corner.

Thank you for reading

I hope you enjoyed reading my first post for this blog. Feel free to leave any comments because I would love to hear your lovely opinion or constructive suggestion to help me improve this blog. You are also welcome to share any interesting videos or blogs that you think might be useful and interesting for me.

Best wishes,

Kamal