Please test me new message boards

James Trotta · Post by **James Trotta** » Fri Jun 18, 2004 1:50 pm

A colleague and I are going to experiemnt with online vocabualry and online grammar notebooks. If anyone has a minute, would you mind testing the message boards we want to use. There could be some problems because I just finished setting them up.

www.learn-english-grammar.com
www.learn-english-vocabulary.com

Please try to register, post a test comment, etc. Don'y hold back any criticism; I can take it. I just want to get everything working exactly right before I introduce my students to it...

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Fri Jun 18, 2004 6:28 pm

I posted to one, made some changes, updated, and everything seems to be working well. It will be interesting to see how the students use them! Will you have them open to anyone to use, or just your students?

James Trotta · Post by **James Trotta** » Sat Jun 19, 2004 6:10 am

Thanks for the test. May I ask what you thought about the categories? Will they be liekly to help students or confuse students?

To answer your question, yes, anyone can use the boards. The more the better. My reasoning is that when a student keeps a vocabulary journal, they can only find so many examples and keep track of so many words. However, when a student keeps his/her journal online, lots of other people can contribute examples. The more examples we have the more students will learn about collocations, usage, etc.

So, if you have students itching to keep online vocabulary or grammar journals, thay are more than welcome to join us. We'll have 2 classes from Korea on the vocabulary board and 1 on the grammar board until July 16th (when the class ends).

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Sat Jun 19, 2004 7:04 am

It's hard to know about the category choices. I imagine you'll find out when students start posting

. After the board is up and being used for a bit, you can probably post the question to the students.

sita · Post by **sita** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 11:55 am

Hi James!

I registered and I like the structure!

Best wishes

James Trotta · Post by **James Trotta** » Thu Jul 15, 2004 10:49 am

BY the way if there's anything I learned trying them out with my current class it's that students need really clear directions. Otherwise you'll end up with ten threads on the same topic, or one thread about lots of topics!