Why blog in International English?

...you may ask. I am tempted to reply with the title of a Cranberries (Irish band from the 90s) album that was very popular when I went to upper secondary myself: "Everybody else is doing it, so why don't we?". However, I think I can offer a more meaningful explanation than that. Obviously, in order to improve your writing in English, you have to write. So far you have handed in answers to the assignments to me, your teacher, and me alone. This is of course fine, but quite often what you hand in are interesting thoughts and perspectives on the topics and questions thrown at you, and I think you should share these thoughts with the world, or at least the others in your English class. I have previously used blogs with my Norwegian classes and what I have found is that blogs help students to:

• develop their digital competence.
• create multimodal texts.
• reflect on the topics and texts we work on in class.
• express thoughts and opinions.
• receive formal and informal feedback from teacher and fellow students.
• share with others.
• create texts that are more creative than more traditional essays.
• write more and thereby improve their writing. Creative and critical writing is important both in education and future jobs. You can read more about student blogging here (in Norwegian).
• take an interest in as well as learn from what fellow students write.

Your blogs will also give me as a teacher a more complete impression of you as students. Besides, International English is a subject that really invites us to gather, share, discuss and comment on information from various sources off and online. We are supposed to work with complex topics such as multiculturalism, intercultural communication, international challenges and the role of the media on the global scene. What is more logical than exploring these topics online? I hope your blogs can serve as a more meaningful and authentic context for your texts than our more traditional learning platform and I also hope you see the advantages in being able to combine your texts with images, videos and links to relevant material online. I am looking forward to reading what you have to say!

(The photo is my own.)