Korean Job Discussion Forums

[summer33ny]

I have been left to my own devices to teach classes with 100 academic high school students for the summer. There is no co-teacher present and the speaking abilities of the students vary from no clue to more advanced than their English teachers.

The students have little interest in academic English. And I would like to show them that English can be practical. have access to a computer lab and was wondering if any teachers have had success using Facebook or Myspace with their students. How did the students respond to it? Did you run into any problems?

[jinks]

I used facebook last semester. I set up a Practical English page and got all my students to sign up and add Practical English as a friend, I had intended for them to add each other as friends too, but that didn't happen. I got each class to decide on a group name and I used the groups for class-specific tasks. I set simple 'add a comment' or 'tag a picture' tasks for each class, but the enthusiasm was overwhelmingly low. Explaining the concept took a lot of class time, and I'm not sure if it was really worth it. Despite low (and grudging) participation rates, I found I was kept very busy responding to comments and writing on students' walls. I'm not going to be doing it again this semester.