BlogMeister

BlogMeister is another new weblogging tool. It is aimed specifically at teachers and their students.

What makes BlogMeister unique is that student publications must be reviewed by the
teacher before they can be made public.

I got the link from Stephen Downes

Join Weblogging

Things have been very quiet around here lately (for various reasons), but I promise they'll pick up again soon. If not in December, then in the New Year.

Meanwhile, I'd like to invite all EFL Bloggers to join the TESOL Electronic Village 2005 session :





Click to join weblogging


Watch this space for further details.

Open Brackets

An interesting thread has opened up on Open Brackets, a weblog dedicated mainly to translation:


"French employees will accuse a US multinational in court today of discrimination, claiming that they are being forced to speak English. [...]

“We think that employees should have the right to understand the instructions they’re given and to follow what is being said in meetings.”

The staff say it is not a question of national pride, but of discrimination. They claim that people have been denied promotion because they speak poor English, and that those who protest are accused of rejecting the company’s ethos."

Google Scholar

Google Scholar

"Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

Jotspot

I haven't had time to take a look at this yet - Jotspot - so I can't vouch for it, but my brother recommends it. At the moment, they are accepting registrations for beta trials.

Bloglines

I must admit that I came late to RSS and Bloglines, but now that I've discovered what it can do for me, I wouldn't like to live without it.

If you haven't discovered it yet, try rerading Alex Halavais' article about what it can do for you and give it a try.

Thanks to Stephen Downes for the tip.

ADE Bloggers

ADE Bloggers is a collaborative blog that has a nice summary of why a teacher might want to use blogging tools. Here's an extract:

"You might like to create a reflective, journal type blog to...


reflect on your teaching experiences.
keep a log of teacher-training experiences.
write a description of a specific teaching unit.
describe what worked for you in the classroom or what didn't work.
provide some teaching tips for other teachers.
write about something you learned from another teacher.
explain teaching insights you gain from what happens in your classes.
share ideas for teaching activities or language games to use in the classroom.
provide some how-to's on using specific technology in the class, describing how you used this technology in your own class.
explore important teaching and learning issues."

There are other answers relating to class weblogs, learner weblogs, shared weblogs, etc...