5 Ways You Can Teach Blogging Using the VWT
If you are a teacher interested in helping your students learn digital literacy and professional writing skills for the real world, blogging projects should be your first choice. Using the Virtual Writing Tutor to help them get started is a smart choice. In this listicle, you'll learn about the free tools you can use to teach a range of common blog post types that will serve your students throughout their blogging careers.
1. Glossary creator.
A glossary writing project is a great way to get students to expand their vocabulary. Knowing a word does not just mean knowing its spelling and definition. It also means knowing how to pronounce it, how to translate it, what it looks like, how it is used in a sentence, and it part of speech. That's why the Virtual Writing Tutor's Glossary Creator includes easy to use tools to add words, reliable definitions, text-to-speech pronunciation models, pictures, translations, and sample sentences from concordances. Once the glossary is finished, the student can generate a card game for interactive speaking practice in class, generate a drag and drop matching exercise, and export it to a blog using HTML. In the process, the glossary project will introduce students to a range of language learning tools on the web that they never knew existed.
2. Career summary chatbot creator.
As students work on developing the skills they will need for their future careers, it would be good if they knew something about the career they were preparing for. That's what this blogging project is so great. Students research a career, summarize what they discover by answering career-related questions, and cite their sources using the RADARS framework. At the end, they will have a handy, error-free career summary that they can export to their blog using HTML, and they will have a working speech recognition-enabled chatbot to practice their speaking skills with. You can then use it as the basis of a midterm speaking task to conduct a one-on-one interview or ask students to create a screencast tutorial.
3. Screencast tutorial script composer
The second most popular search engine on the internet is on YouTube.com. People search YouTube for explanations and tutorials all the time. Teach students how to compose a screencast tutorial to record and post to YouTube and then embed into a blog post. It is an excellent writing project that leads to an online speaking project. The Virtual Writing Tutor makes it easy to do with the screencast creator. It takes the student step-by-step through the composition of an engaging introduction, demonstration, and conclusion, it checks their text for grammar errors, and converts their script into text-to-speech pronunciation models to help them eliminate their pronunciation errors, as well.
4. Hypertext narrative creator.
Critical thinking is not just questioning the reliability of sources. Sure that's part of it, especially in academia. Obviously, critical thinking also must include the ability to see how choices and decisions play out in life. When we think about career choices and the road not taken, we are engaging in a kind of episodic critical thinking that is rarely developed in college ESL courses. Yet, college education is supposed to get students to think about ethical choices in practical terms--not just as abstractions, right? That's where hypertext narratives can be so useful. Get students to begin in the present moment and think about choices they will have to make in their futures, have them explore the consequences of those choices in narrative form, and then get them to link them together with hyperlinks to make a choose-your-own-adventure. The Virtual Writing Tutor makes this kind of writing project easy, with onboard grammar checking and a handy HTML export feature to embed the hypertext narrative into a blog post. Then, students can share their writing with each other. Students love it, and they learn a ton of digital literacy and field-related English in the process.
5. Listicle creator.
This article is a listicle. A listicle is presents a list of prioritized items with an introduction and a conclusion. Listicles are common and effective ways to communicate in writing on the internet. They help students understand paragraphing and prioritize their ideas. The Virtual Writing Tutor has a handy listicle creator. The system guides students in assembling a listicle with an introduction and conclusion, list items with links, images, and descriptive paragraphs. The system provides feedback on grammar errors during the composition process, and displays a word count and error count at the foot of the published listicle. Once the student is happy with the article he or she has written, the listicle can be exported as HTML to their blog. Easy.
Conclusion
With these 5 powerful, yet easy to use tools at your disposal, what are you waiting for? Your students will love blogging. They will value the automated feedback, and grading for you will be a cinch. If you would like a textbook to support you step-by-step, use the Contact Us page on the Virtual Writing Tutor to ask about Actively Engaged Online. You don't need a textbook, but why struggle when teaching blogging for the first time when it could be easy and fun? In any case, use the Virtual Writing Tutor to help and your students jump into blogging this semester.
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Statistics
Word count: 880
Error count: 0
Error density: 0%
