LEARNERS DO WONDERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

      When I listened to Sugata’s speech my impression was that he was speaking about the remote village in Armenia which I happened to visit  this summer in Ijevan.

 It was really disappointing to hear that young generation  wants to move to Yerevan and  teachers there are also very ignorant towards their work because they know for sure that there is no future in that village.  Really when I walked through the village I was in the same opinion: no other work to do except for farming, no place to go except for fields, no motivation to learn and no tool to use. I was sure then that children there wouldn’t have the same amount of intelligence as children living in cities have. However, I was wrong in m judgments. As I had to stay there with my family for some days I took my laptop with me. The two children aged 8-10 had the luck to sit in front of my computer during  those days and as Sugata mentioned they acquired the necessary skills to use it very quickly. The desire to conduct the computer made them learn lots of English words by themselves. Here again I agree with Sugata that children are very self-organized, especially those who are more or less unprivileged.  When I was returning home they said they had two great wishes. First they wanted to have a laptop and then desired to know English well to use it. I doubt  if any child living in the city and obtaining a computer could digest so much information for such a short time.

And the same refers to blogging. There is no point in saying that it’s impossible or just quite difficult to use blogs in language teaching. If given the tool, if given the opportunity our learners can really do a lot. And I quite agree with a “snob blogger” Will Richardson that “through blogs more learning happens” and that “students become network creators”.

I will do my best to become a teacher-blogger, making blogs a part of my practice because blogging is what we need for technology access. With blogging I will promote collaboration among my students, their parents and myself. I do agree with Will Richardson in that by blogging students do a metacognitive thinking and improve their reading and writing skills. I will mostly ask my students to read their peers’ blogs and those of famous bloggers.  By the way, RSS has made the reading process faster by means of which they can collect lots of blogs in one place and save time. Also I will ask the learners to synthesize their ideas and write their stream of thoughts in their blogs. It would also be great to motivate the students with positive feedback and high grades.