WSBlog Bedtime + Best Biblio's and PFs

Eight years I plugged away at chronicling, filtering, modelling, showcasing, recycling, reflecting, and reviewing in posts for students on the Writing Studio Blog (WSBlog). During that time, I learned a lot about blogging with students, and there have been several satisfying advances in Blogger blog affordances as well, for example the advent of pages, and the threading of comments on posts.

Blogger renamed widgets gadgets, and baked many new ones in, which made them easy for casual bloggers such as English-as-an-additional-language learners to use. The link roll on the WSBlog has grown to almost a page in length, and the label cloud, to almost a page and a half (actual size). Embeddable external-source gadgetry like Cluster Maps and Flag Counter indicate[s] that the WSBlog had over 7,000 (perhaps not unique) visitors in the four years up till November 2014, and that there have been well over 18,000 page views since August 2010.

Though I'm relatively certain that those aren't the largest numbers in the blogosphere, they're large enough to reflect on with a certain degree of satisfaction. Regrettably, however, RSS services that colleagues and I had adopted to concatenate feeds of independent learner blog entries for inclusion in our teaching blogs went the way many free or inexpensive services do, and workarounds never quite made it back to the stage of single feeds to display posts from multiple blogs in now standard RSS gadgets–so much to do, and so little time to do it.

Before I put the WSBlog into suspended animation (from which it might snore itself awake from time to time), I'd like to do one more little bit of showcasing–this time not for students in successive cohorts, but rather for those in classes which finished meeting last month. They sat exams on January 28, 2015.

To wrap things up for now, I'd like to point out to class members and their near-peers a few of the best bibliographies–modified APA-style lists of books that individual students reviewed, and the most reflective portfolios (PFs) in pages that students added or linked to their blogs.

• Students, please remember that if you aren't logged in to your university accounts, Google documents and spreadsheets stored on the university site will be invisible. 

• Please also note that for the PFs themselves, the writing before, between and after the iframes was more important than the activities and progress represented within the iframes.

Without further adieu, ...

Best biblio's (book listings):

1. Takahiro's, 
2. Nana's, and
3. Rina's (includes a good first go at a movie listing, too); and 

Best PFs:

1. Misaki's
2. Miri's and Nana's (tie), and
3. Kazuyo's.

Many thanks to all!

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Design 101 for Educators: 5 Simple Typography Tips (CranfordTeague, 2013)

It's high time to return to blogging after an extended summer recess. To get rolling on this blog again, I'd like to point out an Edutopia post in which Jason CranfordTeague (2013.08.13) provided page design tips that may serve students as well as educators:

• Design 101 for Educators: 5 Simple Typography Tips

CranfordTeague focused on font styles as a typographical equivalent to voice, as well as on simplicity, contrast, column width, and my overall favorite–space. As I often tell students, and as a reminder to all who read this blog, "White space is golden!"

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Satoko's Blog*: Advise for my kohai

I found this in my feed reader today. It's full of good advice from one of your predecessors.

• Satoko's Blog*: Advise for my kohai (2013.04.03)

'via Blog this'

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Class notes: Nov. 28 classwork, group work, & homework

Yesterday was a big day in Writing IV, as those of you who attended will recall. Yet, as I have learned to expect, it was also a day on which there were technical challenges, not the least of which (for me, at least) was display of class notes on laboratory monitors.

The screenshot below, an enhanced version of my class notes, more or less reflects board work and general instructions from class yesterday. Square brackets enclose enhancements in this retrospective, or responses to questions in one section of the class or another.

Screenshot of enhanced Nov. 28 class notes, 2012.11.29

Essay prep. posts, as well as previewing, actual viewing, or reviewing of the movies that teams choose, are essential components of the homework assignment for this week.

Please click on the graphic above to get a closer look, or zoom in on it in your browsers. Then, if you have any questions or concern about the classwork, group work, or homework in that outline; please spell them out in comments on this post before the end of November.

Last but not least, I'd like to ask you again to share what you learn from posts on the Writing Studio Blog with your classmates and peers. Thank you in advance for your continuing cooperation.

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Pointers to videos from the LLD Project Blog

In this post, I'm replicating a post on the Language Learner Development Project Blog with the author's permission. I want to share, here, the same pointers to a collection of videos for listening comprehension that I did on that blog.

Let’s Have Fun with English: Videos for listening comprehension

Posted by Paul Beaufait in LanguageLearning

Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for pointing out Ms. Haquet’s Let’s Have Fun with English video collection in one of his posts:

• Excellent Video Site for Learning English (2012.03.26).

Here’s a direct link to Ms. Haquet’s site, and here’s another straight to her menu of videos for listening comprehension. The two videos that I’ve previewed so far represented … [two distinct] cultures, and ranged in difficulty from intermediate to advanced:

• The Crown Jewels, and
• Wolverine.

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Tags: activities, cultures, listening, videos, viewing

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2012 at 14:57 pm and is filed under LanguageLearning. ...

If you're looking for a bit of variety or a change in pace in video viewing, you should check out Ms. Haquet's video resource collection. I have no doubt you'll find other videos there that are challenging to listen to, as well as interesting to watch.

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Three Simple Tools for Creating Strong Passwords

In a recent post on his blog, Free Technology for Teachers, Richard Byrne introduced Three Simple Tools for Creating Strong Passwords (2012.04.20). He wrote, "One of the best ways to protect your online identity is to create strong passwords containing unique characters. Sometimes it's difficult to think of new strong passwords" (para. 2). The tools he introduced can help you generate strong passwords quickly and easily.

'via Blog this'

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Blog Visits Rebound

In a post some time ago (2009.10.23), and in a follow-up comment later on (2010.01.15), I reflected on a two-thirds drop in year-on-year blog visits logged by ClustrMaps, from 3891 to 1297, 2007–2008 to 2008–2009. That may have been due to shrinkage of my blogosphere.

Yet in 2009–2010, there was a rebound to more than half the number of the first year visits on record. This graphic from a Google spreadsheet shows reversal of the downward trend:

Year-on-year blog visits logged by ClustrMaps

I'm looking forward to finding out whether the increase from 2009 to 2010 continues from 2010 into 2011.

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PocketCultures: Poll of the Month (September 2010)

Thanks to a link from Carla Arena, who explores "the wonders of the Online World" from Brazilia (Google Profile), I discovered the PocketCultures website today. On it, prominently displayed near the top of the home page, was a Poll of the Month asking, "How many languages do you speak?"

Though people responding to that poll hardly represent a random sample of world populations, or even blogger populations for that matter, it is interesting to note two points in particular:

1. Less than a quarter of current responses represent speakers of only one language, and
2. More than a quarter of the responses represent speakers of more than three languages!

 (2010.09.28, c. 11:00 JST)

How about you: How many languages do you speak now, and how many do you want to be able to speak in the future?

If you're interested in finding out about various cultures around the world, PocketCultures offers three categories of posts to explore, focusing on topics, people, and blogs. Check 'em out, and let us know what you discover in a comment on this post when you get back!

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