Why Blog?
For my first post I decided I’d state what I hope to get out of blogging. I wasn’t introduced to the world of professional blogging in ELT until about a month ago (today’s date is Sept. 29th, 2009). I’ve always worked in developing countries and the community of professionals that exist in more developed countries is a bit lacking. Few teachers use the Internet for more than finding pictures or the ever-present, and usually terribly designed, worksheets that litter the information superhighway.
Having discovered an entire community of professionals that communicate via blogs, Twitter, and other web 2.0 resources, I became motivated to not just passively observe this medium, but to become a fully active member of the community. Blogging is one of many great ways to not only share information with other teachers, but to get feedback about your own ideas. As educators we can all work together and help each other. This is especially important for countries like Turkey where there is so little professional development and few physical forums for teachers to meet and share. So many teachers here are disconnected from each other and lack the means to help each other out even if they wanted to. Forums like blogs and Twitter can only help us develop ourselves and make things better for our students.
I also see blogging as a glimmer of hope. In a world of ELT where so many teachers work in developing nations and yet so much literature is published and so many speeches are given that fail to address the problems we have. All these wonderful ideas and approaches are batted around, but those of us working in developing countries have so many other problems to deal with before we even step foot in the classroom. The struggle to train the learners is often more difficult than the struggle to teach them English. What I dream of is a network of teachers that develop core strategies for dealing with these problems. I want to see lesson plans that not only teach English, but also incorporate strategies that teach the students how to learn at the same time.
Whatever the result of this effort is, blogging helps me to organize and work out my own thoughts about teaching, connect with other teachers, and add something to the community of online educators. In the end, we will all benefit.
The mission statement and purpose of this particular blog can be found on the About page.
Tags: Blogging
Uncategorized | turklis1 | 
September 29, 2009 6:03 pm
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