As a language teacher you now have access to some great online tools that can really assist you and your students with their studies.  Among the best of these are blogs.  Blogs provide a never ending source of new ideas, content, and materials to study, review and discuss, but they also are a great tool for both teachers and students.  Here are a few ways that a blog can help and be used by language students and language teachers.

Blogs for esl students

Self publishing

• practice writing
• intereact with others having same issues
• develop comfort level with language
• increased interaction with language

Language Learners Self Study

• reading other blogs
• participating in online discussions on other blogs
• researching and locating new content to learn and study
• access to vast volumes of content on topics they are personally interested in
• tons of language learning resources are available as well.

Blogs for Language Teachers

 Self Publishing

• provide a place for teachers to distribute materials
• simple and effective communication portal
• way to provide additional learning resources and opportunities for students
• can serve as an easy place to obtain tutoring clients (for both in person and online tutoring)

Content and Professional Development

• You can obtain great ideas and materials from other's blogs.  Just be sure to give credit where it is due.
• Allow very easy distribution and development of both audio and video content that you create
• can be a place to have professional interaction with other language teachers
• easy way to develop and/or participate in an existing community of language teachers and educators

These are just some of the ways that you can use a blog in your language learning classroom, or simply as a language learner or language teacher.  Setting up and maintaining a blog is not very difficult at all - even for people who are perhaps not so technically inclined.  How to set up a language learning blog will be the subject of an upcoming post.

Until then,

Cheers.

Eric

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