Exploring web tools

After watching Nik Peachey's conference I decided to try a web tool called blipfoto, and here's my humble outcome.

This is a tool with which you can take a daily photo, describe it and uploade it. You can use it on your laptop or on your mobile. In my case, I downloaded the app on my mobile and uploaded my entry from there. Then I checked it on my laptop. The webpage has a forum and journals can be grouped by themes. You can also subscrbe to the journals of your interest.  

Considering Peachey's criteria, I chose this tool for different reasons:

- This is something students would do in real life. In fact, many of them do, what with facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. etc. etc. (when I was a teenager we used to do it with fotolog!!! I guess that says something about my age). 

- It is free!!! 

- It is not specifically designed for ELT. Thus, it has an authentic purpose, it can be used for real communication.

- It is easy to access: you can use it on your laptop or on your mobile phone. 

- It is really easy to use, and you can learn in 5-10 minutes. Peachey very wisely says that if learning how to use a tool takes you longer than 10 minutes, then it's not worth teaching. 

- Hopefully, students will get hooked by this site and will use it more than once. 

- It requires registration, which offers a kind of protection for our students.

- The learning outcome is tangible and concrete.

On a previous post I wrote that I had tried using a facebook group with former students of mine but I felt that I was not able to encourage natural participation. Now that I have explored this tool, I can say this would have been a great idea. Perhaps, I could have assigned dates to students (one very important thing about this tool is that you get to upload only one entry per day, and you really cannot lie about the date) and have asked them to take a picture that day and write about what they were doing. Then they could have posted the link to facebook, at least at first. Then gradually they could have started using blipfoto directly. I'm sure this would have encourgae students to comment on their classmates' entries sicne, as I said before, that is what they do on facebook and other social networks.