TJ12 Students´work on the blog during the strike

Before teachers from public schools began the strike, I tried to motivate students for them to finish all the activities on the blog.I told them that if they  finish all the activities, I will give a tenth part to them for the final grade. It was on April 22^nd, today is April 29^th and any student has done an activity on the blog.

TJ11 Reflection

Tabulating the information about students´opinion of the activities on the blog, I reflected on the way the blog was designed and  I think that maybe if students had done their activities on their pages and each group would have to comment on another group´page it would have be more intersting for students since they would have the opportunity to observe all their classmates´work and value their own work. I believe that in this way students could feel more engaged instead of doing all their activities in different places where they could not see their progress nor their classmates.

TJ10 Students´ production on the blog

When I was checking students´work on the blog, I could notice that most of the students did mistakes using the expressions they had to choose when writing comments. They continued writing sentences without subjects and with bad punctuation. I also noticed that some of them wrote the activities in Spanish or in Spanglish. I also realized that most of the students did the easiest and shortest activities. I can say that most of the students did not take advantage of the blog since I can see a very superficial work on the blog.Another aspect that students did not take into account was the replies  I made to their comments. I replied  to students´comments for them to correct the activities when necessary but any student took them into consideration altough I asked them in class to check them at home and correct the activities.

TJ9 Working on the blog in the system class.

In the system class, students did the activities on the blog and  I could observe different attitudes and behaviours in them. First of all,I noticed that although students had the instructions of the activities on the blog,they asked me "teacher what do I have to do? ".I could see that students did not like to read long texts since they were lazy to read all the instructions.I thought that maybe the instructions were very long in some activities. Another issue that I could observe in the groups was that some students did all the activities and the others did not do anything although I encouraged them to help their classmates.I also noticed that students got confused using two pages on the blog.Though students had the instructions on the blog they wanted to be told what they had to. Furthermore, I observed that although theory says that teenagers are digital natives because they were born in a digital era, the students who participated in the research project using the blog have difficulties using technological tools. For instance,some students asked me about how to upload a picture. I really believed that becuase they are familiar with social networks like facebook, they would use technological tools very easy,but some of the students showed difficulties using the blog  and lack of interest.

I also realized that some students did not do the activities on the blog because they were not mandatory and although I tried to motivate them with some extra marks in English class they did not care about that. Moreover, I think that parents were not very attentive to check if students had taken advantage of the blog although they knew that it was a very useful resource for students to practice English at home.

TJ8 Autonomous work on the blog

I assigned  students some activities to be done at home,but most of them did not do the actvities on their own. This work was mostly done  in the system class.I noticed that students who work best in English class were the same who worked a lot on the blog. However, two or three students whose work had been very low in English class asked me some doubts they had about the activties on the blog. I  also want to highlight that one student who failed almost all the subjects did many activities on the blog on his own at home.

TJ7 Working on the blog during the Holy Week

On March 28^th, I gave a worksheet to students for them to solve some activities on the blog during the Holy Week. This worksheet was given during the parents´ meeting of the first term at school. I reminded parents that the blog was a very useful tool for students to practice English at home.I also asked parents to pay attention to students´ work on the blog during the Holy Week for them to take advantage of it. Moreover, I clarified that students who do the activities will have some extra marks in English class, and students who had failed the English subject in the first term had to do these activities as a part of the recovery work.

The activities that students had to do were (3.welcome, 5.intrdoduce yourself, 6. English sentence structure and 7. Writing paragraphs).Students also had to give their opinions about each one of the activities answering a short survey in Spanish. I explained in detail how to solve the survey to students who told me that they did not understand this part.

One day before finishing the Holy Week,I checked students´work on the blog and only very few students had done an activity on the blog.I did not understand why if they had had an entire week to work on it,they did the activities at the last minute.

TJ6 Second time working on the blog

On March 16^th, students were in contact with their Kidblog for the second time. During this session in system class, they had to make a post about their welcome to their classmates on their group page. They had to write the word welcome as the title of their post, choose an image related to this word and introduce themselves in a short way. I noticed that some students easily did the activity, but others not. I took advantage of the students who finished quickly to help the other students. In this way, most of the students could do the activity.