ELT Expert Blog Review: Wednesday Seminars

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#ELT

#WednesdaySeminars

#TeachinginVietnam

I have got a great chance to check out a few blogs recommended by my ICT module at Warwick, and one of the blogs that caught my attention was Zhenya Polosatova's Wednesday Seminars: https://wednesdayseminars.wordpress.com/

My first impression about this is how dedicated Zhenya is with all her blog posts all the way from 2013. Honestly, I am not a big fan of writing since I am not yet confident with my teaching expertise and way with words, but I feel Zhenya's consistent efforts with blogging convinced me that blogging is not only a space for sharing knowledge but also a platform for sharing experience (including struggles :D) of working as a teacher. 

My two cents on her blog (mainly focusing on her activity idea posts):

Organisation and Layout 

It's a typical blog layout with clear sections for her different fields of interest. There is also a section on the right showing the blog posts in monthly categories, and suggestions for other blogs in ELT. It's like an infinite loop of ELT blogs that continuously give you good resources for teaching blogs around the world. 

Perhaps at the start of her blog, she could include some quick information about the activity as follows:

• Materials: paper sheets, markers, 
• Time of activity: 10 minutes
• Level: Beginner to Intermediate students
• Skills: Speaking

I actually came up with this because only when I scrolled to the bottom did I realise all the tags were there :D I personally love the quick information inclusion at the top because I have to admit that these days, reading has to be efficient for me, and if there are quick keywords at the top of the post, I will be able to anticipate the content and choose to dig deeper into it or not. Perhaps I am so used to reading abstracts and keywords of journal articles, so I find it hard to read without them haha

Content and Features

Regarding content, she has a clear focus on her blog, mainly about teacher training, teaching ideas, or materials development. Her activity blog posts are very detailed about the activity description and illustrations for handouts that fellow teachers can follow and make adjustments to their teaching needs. Zhenya also gives very interesting anecdotes about how she came up with the ideas for the activity and some reviews of how the activity played out from her experience. I just think how amazing it is that she is able to come up with so many ideas surrounding the theme of Hand and this comes to show just how creative teachers could be. 

Her professional development posts are also pretty insightful. She mainly outlined the questions and the tasks in her meetings and sometimes a few interesting ideas that she got from colleagues during the sessions. I would say that the titles of her posts do not seem to do them justice. The titles are quite basic and unassuming even, and for someone new to the blog, I would not guess what the post could be about with a title like "My First Supervision Meeting" or "An ELT Supervision Meeting". I feel like it would be better if the titles were clearer and more detailed, like "Art-therapy supervision meeting" or "An Ideal ELT Supervision Meeting for Me"

In general, her content and blogging styles are pretty straightforward and interesting, and she uses an authentic voice while relaying her thoughts on the blog. These are two key things that I should attempt to do on my own blog as well.

Ease of use and Navigation

This was hard to say, actually, since I am not used to reading blogging websites, so it seems like I need to spend more time getting used to posting and browsing through the blog to give a fair review. 

However, I do say that the tags on each post are pretty helpful for navigation. I usually go to blogs to search for teaching ideas, but it would take so much time to read and find a suitable one. So I find the tags with clear indications about the type of skills, tools, and aims. However, my suggestion would be to add tags on the level of students or class size that the activity could be used for. I do see that many of her reflective practice activities are for teachers and even students, so maybe an inclusion of "all levels" tags would be useful for readers like me to pre-read the content of the blog. 

The sheer number of It’s in (Y)Our Hands! is very impressive. Sadly, some of the activities in this section are not clickable, meaning that it only shows post titles and not links to check them out. Some of her clickable activity posts have been great so far, so I wish the other posts had hyperlinks embedded in them.

Target audience

I think her posts target teachers with interests in professional development and teacher training, hence not too many posts on general teaching. She also interacts frequently with commenters on her blog as well, which I thought was very sweet! 

I do say that I am not her target audience though, because my interest is a bit different from hers, and as mentioned before, I usually consult blogs for teaching ideas. However, I do appreciate the fact that I got introduced to this blog because professional development and teacher training, through her stories, seems very interesting and inspiring. I also think her friendly writing style makes her posts and content very easy to comprehend for readers in general, so I would say that experienced and inexperienced teachers would have a great time navigating this blog.

Overall, my two main key takeaways from this blog would be:

• Use an authentic voice for blogging: As my professor Tilly mentioned in class, AI seems to do all the work for us these days. But when it comes to teaching, our experience and expertise are really what matters and only our own voice can give fellow teachers an authentic accounts of teaching. That is why I tried my best to incorporate my voice in this post today, to save water (yes I read about ChatGPT using up our resources) and connect with other teachers through my own stories. I don't know if it is working, though, maybe it is a bit too informal for a typical blog. But I actually feel more comfortable writing like this because I struggle so much more with formal, academic writing (just too serious for such an unserious gal like me). However, I may change my writing style for the upcoming blog posts
• Blog consistently, about anything teaching: Before this, I thought that in order to start a blog, you have to have expertise to blog something. That seems incredibly intimidating (this is why I never post stuff publicly). However, triumphs and failures in teaching are something worth sharing too, so that other teachers and myself can learn from the experience and improve our practice. 

I also find this YouTube video quite helpful for building a personal blog:

 

The video is straightforward, with clear and doable steps on how to create and develop a blog for anyone, not just teachers. I personally like her tip on "Doing Your Research" because blogging from scratch can be intimidating, so referencing some resources to get a hang of how a blog might look like would be good.

Another ELT blog that I have been reading since 2021 is Alex Case TEFLtastic https://tefltastic.wordpress.com and TESOL International Association  https://www.tesol.org/blog 

Alex is just a wonderful teacher and his content is so amazing. I have used many of his activities in my own classroom in Vietnam and my students really enjoyed them. TESOL International Association is also a very good source for ELT teachers, and I also signed up for a one-year membership here to get more resources.

Hope this post helps (if you managed to read until this point, wow, give yourself a pat on your back)