Pukman @ WinK: the community that time didn't forget

Basic English 2 classes are held in standard classrooms, so we won't make heavy use of blogs. But I will sometimes post some important information here, so you should visit from time to time. And if you want to make your own blog, tell me your address, then you can communicate with other students who are blogging.

You should check the class calendar (available from the sidebar) from time to time. I will tag messages aimed at all BE2 students "be2". Special information for each group will be tagged "be2a" or "be2d".

Here are some screenshots of the GMail sign-up process. Take your time, and be careful not to make mistakes. Remember that GMail has millions of users so, for example, "taro" is not an acceptable username. If your name is Taro Miyamoto, you might try "taro.miyamiya".

Hi everyone and welcome to Writing 4! This course will be quite similar to Writing 3, with some differences.

First of all, the course is based around blogging. Probably, you can all type faster and write more than you could in the 1st semester, so you can enjoy blogging more and make your blogs more interesting.

Second, as in the first semester, you should write weekly book reviews.

Third, we will also have regular writing assignments. But there will be more variety in the assignments. We will do some work exploring and explaining Kumamoto, and we will try to use some multimedia. We will work in pairs or small groups sometimes. I will try to link some of your activities to those of the Modern English 4 students in the Faculty of Letters at PUK, so you can share ideas with them.

Last semester, I generally used different blogs with different classes. This semester I am doing everything on this blog. The most important messages to Writing 4 students will be marked "wri4". But you should read as many of my other posts as possible, particularly those marked "teachertalk". Also, I have created a class calendar, with dates of classes and assignment deadlines. Remember these are deadlines: if you do the assignments early, you don't need to worry about them.

Finally, I'm going to ask you to create a new blog on Blogger beta for this class, linked to a GMail account. It may be a little inconvenient at first, but the features are much better than the original Blogger, and it allows you to change colours and the appearance of your blog easily.

Hi, has everyone seen Kana's photos? They're very nice. Hey, don't forget to give the photos names, Kana!

Did you notice Akicyann's post about writing essays? She found a site that gives lots of advice in Japanese. Check it out if you have time! I particularly liked this page on essay structure.

We're going to use Blogger beta. Go to www.blogger.com and choose the Blogger beta command at the top of the page.
Then choose "Create a blog".
You will be taken to Stage 2, which is naming your blog. The blog title is the words you want to appear at the top of your page. You can use any letters (upper or lower case), spaces, etc. Use your imagination!
But the blog address (URL) is not so free. Please DON'T use SPACES, UPPERCASE LETTERS, !, ?, commas, or any other unusual symbols. Just use lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. (Only lowercase letters is easiest to remember.) But remember that there are already millions of blogs. If you write something very simple and short, that URL probably won't be available.
After you have input your URL, click "Check availability". If that URL is already taken, choose one from the list of suggestions, or try a new one. Be patient!
When you have a blog title and URL, type the word verification code and press continue.
Choose a template. Don't spend too long deciding because you can choose from a wider selection later.
Then write your first post! The purpose is to test your blog, so make the post very short. (You can edit it later.) Press "Publish".
Choose "View Blog in a new window". Can you see your blog? Write down the URL that you can see in the address bar. This is your blog address to tell me and your friends.

The service we will use for blogging in this course is Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com). Blogger.com is owned by Google, and is very popular worldwide. If possible we will use Blogger beta, because this is much better than the original Blogger.com.

Before we use any kind of web service like Blogger.com, we have to sign up. This means we tell Blogger.com who we are. The most important thing we need for this is an email address. Your university email address is not ideal for this, because you may not be able to use it when you are outside the university. So we will use a webmail service called GMail, also owned by Google. You will use this email address when you sign up for Blogger.com, and when you sign up for any other web service.

The most important thing to remember is:

• You must write down your GMail username and password! You need this to check your mail and to use Blogger. If you forget other passwords, you can usually get a new one through GMail. But if you can't use GMail, things will be very difficult.

And two more things to remember: sign up means to become a member; sign in means to log in as a member to use the service. So you only sign up once, but you sign in every time you want to use the service.

Our main activity in Basic English 4 is blogging. A blog (web log) is a kind of online journal that anyone can read. It's a good way for you to write (in English) about anything that interests you. Because everyone in the class will have a blog, you can read all your friends' blogs, too. So blogging is a good way to communicate with everyone.

To enjoy blogging, it's important that you write often. If you write often, you will learn to use the blogging software, you will become a faster typist, you will think faster in English, and you will communicate better with your classmates. Then blogging will become more enjoyable and you will learn to write more naturally. So, for the first month or so, you need to blog on at least 4 days each week (including the day of the class). A key phrase for your blogging is "十分は十分": if you can find 10 minutes to use a computer, that is enough to write a post. At the beginning, don't worry how much you write each time. And you can write about anything: what you did last night, your hobby, a difficult lecture, a TV programme you watched yesterday, etc.

Another key phrase for the course is: "If it isn't written down, it didn't happen." That means that if you attend a class but don't write even one blog post, that is the same as being absent. And if you do a class activity but don't write about it on your blog, that's the same as not doing the activity.

Don't forget that you can blog from any computer with an Internet connection. Just visit www.blogger.com and enter your username and password.

I'll tell you more about the course in another post. For now, just remember: 十分は十分 !

This is my first post on the new Blogger beta. The only change I can see is the addition of labels, or tags, and that is a really big change! I encourage all students to create a blog here, and use the labels imaginatively!

Let's create a list of suggested labels. Of course you can use others, too, but having a standard list to start will help everyone organize their posts. My ideas:

• books (for book reviews)
• vocabulary (for wordlists, or any posts about dictionaries, Visual Thesaurus, etc.)
• quickpost (any post you finish in less than 10 minutes, e.g. for "十分は十分" posts at the beginning of the class)
• personal (anything you write about friends, what you did at the weekend, etc.)
• essay (any major writing assignment you post to your blog)
• task (any small assignment you do in class, e.g. playing a game and reporting your result on your blog)
• photo (any post with a photo and a proper title -- NOT "xht2345677.jpg")
• link (any post that includes a link to another blog or web page)
• classlink (any post that includes a link to another blog in your class)
• winklink (any post that includes a link to a blog in another class or another University)
• otherstudy (any post that discusses your other classes)
  

Any more ideas? Remember, you can use several labels in one post.

In addition I will use some special labels. The most important one is the special label for your class. Posts with this label will include instructions for what to do in class, homework assignments, information about exams and what you need to do to pass the course, and so on. You need to read all of these. Another label is "teachertalk". This is general advice for all the classes I teach.