Reading Carol Goodey’s excellent post “Listening for learning” has inspired me into writing one of my bi-annual posts 🙂

My third year university students each has to create a wiki to keep a “courselog”. I say “has to” since the content of their courselog (and vocabulary note book) gives them their continual assessment mark 😛

At the beginning of this adventure, some 4 or 5 years ago, I was reading again and again “we did this, we did that” and although it allowed these French students to finally get their simple past tense in order, the result for me the teacher was pretty boring to correct.

So now, two students are responsible for summarizing each week “what went on in the class” on the class wiki and the instructions for the individual courselogs is that they have to write a paragraph saying WHY we did what we did, and what did they (the individual) learn. And I just love reading them!

Sometimes the students find a logic of which I the teacher was not even aware! But even the weaker ones have to “think a bit” about what they’re doing LOL.

Teaching English in a Physics dept, I do not usually have the most enthousiastic of language students, and this system has completely changed their approach to learning, so thanks Carol – I’ll put Jenny Kemp’s idea directly into application during this semester, which has just started for us.