ESOL Blogs

At last I've done my long promised review of ESOL Blogs. I've added a few new entries on the Blogs page of the Skills for Life Website. I decided not add a lot of links for a number of reasons including:

• There are a lot of ESOL (or EFL/ESL) blogs out there, and it's not at all easy to choose between them. So I have only included ones I follow (in Pageflakes) or ones that made a special impact.
• Blogs come and go a lot. Class blogs are likely only to run for a year. People move city or job. People lose interest. I followed one promising set of links without realising the list was a couple of years old and very few of the links led to an active blog.
• It would be more useful for anyone to follow links from the rolls on the blogs I've listed or from suggestions within the text.
  

The ubiquity and variety and strength of the ESOL blogs makes a striking contrast to the paucity of literacy and numeracy blogs. However, I think these ESOL blogs can give any literacy or numeracy tutor lots of ideas:

• how to use blogs in a class
• how to use technology in classes
• how to use Web 2.0 in classes
• how to reflect on your teaching
  
• about teaching generally

I also came across 2 Pageflakes samples, one where Pageflakes is used as a class homepage and one which links a whole lot of ESF/ESL blogs.