Whadayaknow? The experiment went pretty well

My Business Correspondence blog experiment was a success.

The idea is pretty simple: provide a blog forum for my students to write in, so that I can more easily manage the editing and they can see the results quicker. And not only can they check out their own assignment - they can compare with what the other students have written and hopefully pick up a few good habits from eachother.

No doubt, I'm simply reinventing the wheel, here. Surely this method of teaching online has already been used for more advanced educational uses. But nobody showed me how to do this, so a little triumphant "I am so smart, I am so smart" chant is probably not completely uncalled for.

The students actually seem to be enjoying the online writing method. And while the necessity of pairing off for lack of terminals is kind of lame, it's resulted in some pretty decent collaborative efforts (and only half as much editing on my part - yeehah!)

I still had to spend about an hour going through all of the posts, but it's likely no more than I would have had to spend with paper drafts. Besides, this way, my editing tips get around to all of the students. Where one pair of students flounder in spelling errors, another pair might have difficulty putting the target language into the right context - but they will all learn from eachother's mistakes.

Three more days of this and two more of these assignments and I'll be teaching Finance.

Now, if only I actually knew how to read a business balance sheet...

tags: Business English, blogging ESL, CALL, online ESL, business correspondence