There is an interesting video in the internet: Blog in Plain English.

The video shows a short introduction to blogs - how they work and why they matter. Let’s enjoy it.

Video from Common Craft Store

We can find a lot of interesting videos in the internet. Some of them are very useful in teaching. Edblog provides a convenience platform for teacher to integrate video and other multimedia resources into their teaching materials.

In the Internet, we can obtain many information and tools of different types. Many of them are free to use. With the help of these free tools, learning and teaching should not be confined to classrooms, can be mobile and dynamic.

Vocabulary building is a very important part in learning English, yet it is quite hard for student to memorize large amount of words. To encourage students’ self-learning of vocabulary, teachers may introduce different tools to their students. Yahoo! I-pen is a newly established tool, which can be downloaded and installed to the computer, providing meanings and pronunciation of words in website, Word and pdf documents. Dr. Eye is another tool which can help checking the meaning through the tool bar of the browsers. You can also get a vocabulary a day through email once you have made subscription to the websites, helping students to build their own vocabulary learning log book. Likes vocabularylist.com, students will receive e-mail with vocabulary together with the English meaning, examples, etc, regularly.

Student can also learn a lot of phrasal verbs on the Internet. There are online dictionaries for phrasal verbs such as EnglishPage and UsingEnglish.com. With these online dictionaries, student can easily look for the meaning of different collocations. Checking difficult words can be more flexible without carrying traditional, thick and heavy dictionary.

Furthermore, make use of the free online translation tools can help English learning too. Students can learn vocabulary mainly related to their daily life. Google Translator and WorldLingo Translator are two online translators which can translate words, passages and website. Teachers can also guide their students to plug-in a translator into their blog. For reference, you may find the procedures from this website: http://ait-shan.blogspot.com/2008/01/google-translate.html. Although the translated version is not perfect, it is not bad for learning vocabulary through their hobby.

There are many other tools on the Internet. Teachers can introduce and encourage students to make good use of the tools in order to motivate their learning incentive.

I seldom use blog but it is great to be in a group with other teachers of the same subjects by using Edblog. It is a good chance for us to share experience and exchange idea. 

I find Teacher Net of HKEdCity a very effective tool for teachers’ professional support. I can get up-to-date educational information and various digital teaching resources there. I especially appreciate ‘Teacher TV’ which is an online TV programs on good practices in the classrooms of award-winning teachers.