A little blog experiment in Business class

I was not looking forward to this week.

I teach a Business English class. Most of the time, it's a lot of fun. The students are usually of a high calibre before they even walk in the door for their first day. And the subject material (phrases for negotiations, meetings, marketing, etc) is a welcome respite from the basic curriculum of the morning (phrases for ordering in a restaurant, reserving a plane ticket, describing one's family, etc).

But this week, the unit is Business Correspondence - not my favorite.

The curriculum is just as good as for the other units and the students are just as motivated while doing their work. But the prospect of correcting drafts of letters, memos and assorted documentation filled me with a bit of a grim disquiet.

It's a simple, straightforward and most of all, quick, process to correct someone's spoken errors. But wading through crinkly pages haphazardly turned in, full of mangled syntax, in order to improve someone's written communications takes a lot more time and effort. Frankly, I don't get paid enough to spend my after-school hours doing that.

And so, I hit on the idea of the Business Correspondence blog. I find it alot easier to cut, paste and edit someone's stuff on the computer than hunting and pecking through scribbled sheets of looseleaf (Doesn't everyone?). So why not just sit my students down in the computer lab and have them write out their assignments online? Besides, having a communal blog for all the students to write their assignment would allow them to view eachother's work more comprehensively - and hopefully, to learn from eachother.

They seemed to enjoy the idea, even if there weren't enough computers for everyone, necessitating collaborations all around. Tomorrow, they'll get a chance to finish up their first assignment. Then I can hopefully speed through the editing process with some highlighting, cutting, pasting and a few comments I can address to everyone.

I only wish more of my students had Internet access at home, so they could work on this stuff whenever they wanted, or as part of their assigned homework.

Still, it's not a bad start. I'll have to see how I want to apply this to my other classes. With any luck, I'll revolutionize how classes are taught at this school - or maybe in a bigger field. More to come on this later.

tags: business English, business correspondence, writing, online learning, CALL