Bonjour!

This is my first blog post, and I am interested to see what will become of this experiment in reflection upon and sharing of my learning and teaching experiences. I have come to recognize lately that there is great value in being a reflective teacher who collaborates with others to share ideas and provide encouragement.

Blogging is also a tool I would like my online French students to use (in limited measure, at least for a start), and with any tool or tech skill, I want to be well-versed with the technology before I ask my students to use it. Barbara Sawhill's excellent article titled The Changing Role of the Language Teacher/Technologist (2008) reminded me of this instructional principle when she said, "[j]ust as language teachers should be proficient in the language, they also need to demonstrate proficiency in the technologies they use and be ready to defend their use ...as a viable, pedagogically sound tool for teaching and learning" (p. 3). Therefore, I really need to take time to experiment with this form of reflection and communication as I evaluate the effectiveness of its use and synthesize opportunities for my students to use it.

Finally, I'm also interested in possibly trying different applications for blogging, such as Wordpress. I'm finding that the best way to really discover the features of each specific tool is by actually creating content with it.

Thank you for reading, and I welcome any constructive feedback,
William

References

Sawhill, B. (2008). The changing role of the language teacher/technologist: Connected learning, meaningful collaborations, and reciprocal apprenticeships in the foreign language curriculum. IALLT Journal of Language Learning Technologies, 40(1), 1-17. Retrieved from http://www.iallt.org/sites/default/files/Sawhill08.pdf