Ling's

When I was in primary school, I had a Baidu blog already. It is quite an open and interesting place to share opinions and make friends. I wrote diaries and put them on my blog. Expectedly my friends always gave some comments on my writing. Actually it was rare to use a blog among my peers during that time. So my blog friends were not my classmates but my sisters (my aunt’s daughters), my parents’ students (my parents are teachers in a senior high school so their students are all senior high students) and someone else I knew but elder than me. Also I have many blog friends who were just strangers to me and were not in the same city with me.

Nowadays kids start accessing screens much earlier than me and they can use some online platforms like blog to makes friends and share ideas. It is really good but needs to be guided under instructions. When I have found the advantages of these online platforms (break the limit of time and space, very convenient and fashionable), all the advantages could be limited when dealing with young learners. So if my learners are some young kids, definitely I will choose some half-controlled platforms rather than free-controlled ones. But it is still a challenging work. So I wonder if anyone could give some suggestions for teaching young learners by using some online apps or materials.

But anyway, the first thing I want to do in this course is to create something for my adult learners because I am a Chinese Mandarin teacher now in Edinburgh but I only use textbooks as my teaching materials. After exploring Block 1 of this course, I think I can do something creative for my students by making use of online platforms. Blog will be considered as one of my teaching tools as all I have written so far is about blog. I hope my students can share their feelings and trace their learning records on their own blogs by transferring the way they do their homework boringly into sharing something they have already learned or are still curious about on blog (now I usually ask them to do some review things and pre-learning things but due to some reasons not all people complete their homework, maybe the traditional way is a little bit boring and adults learners all have their own occupations so they may forget doing their homework or they may think they do not have to do it). I am not intended to add any pressure for my students but really want to raise their interests. So I think blog can help me to achieve this. Besides Blog, Cloudschool also catches my attention. I love its clean page format. When I put the course’s materials onto it, things will be much easier. It is very convenient for my students to go back what they want to review or preview.