A blogging project with my tourism students

What follows is a sketch of a blogging project I prepared these past few weeks. My students are in their second year at the College of Tourism, their English is on CEF B2 and they are twenty years old.

Aims of the English course

• help students discover the culture of the disciplinary community they are going to belong oneday by guiding them through a number of different professional genres (reports, news, articles,abstracts, etc.);
• encourage students to read professional texts in the field of tourism and develop their reading skills;
• encourage students to engage in simple professional writing and learn to take notes, describe and define simple tourism related phenomena, summarize, compare views, write short reports, etc.;
• encourage students to engage in discussions of tourism related issues, share summaries of articles they have read, present their views, etc.;
• encourage students to enlarge their professional vocabulary and deepen their knowledge of words;
• help students become autonomous learners of English.

Blogging project outline
I expect my blog will guide my students through the activities that are designed mainly as homework. I am planning to spend two sessions (90 minutes each) in the computer lab and help students to create their individual blogs and a class blog which will feature their recommendations, annotated lists of links to useful / good tourism-related Internet sites and posts they would like to share with the rest of the class. At the end of the semester students will be able to print out a selection of posts they have written and comments they have sent to their mates and include these in their assessment portfolios. I will then discuss these with them during the oral exam.

The assessment portfolios were planned for this academic year and the students were informed about them during our first meeting in October. Blogging will introduce change our plans only slightly: students will send their homework to their blogs instead of placing it in a folder, and they will read their mates’ blogs and comment them (peer review is believed to be very efficient). I have decided to add a few writing activities that have nothing to do with tourism to encourage their creativity (I slightly adjusted the Proust questions - Lesley thank you very much for the idea, and will also ask students to post the photo of a mug and its story - thank you, Sergei, for the idea, review the blog of an American journalist living in Slovenia and share their reactions to a poem).

Assessment
I decided to regard blogging as a tool for developing students’ professional English, so blogs will act as an aid to the learning process. I will regularly use a short self-assessment questionnaire to raise students’ awareness of the learning process and help them to focus on the quality of their own involvement (their contribution to the learning process and personal growth). Students’ self-assessment will also serve as feedback to me (it will help me to introduce possible modifications to my blogging projects in the future).
Only a selection of products (individual posts) will be assessed together with their presentation / discussion at the oral exam.