Using elgg with EFL & ESL students :: Blog

I just discovered this community and hope to connect with others who are using Elgg in the classroom. I have blogged (blogger and eslblogs) with classes, but am really excited about the blog + ePortfolio + community nature of Elgg. Has anyone used Elgg with EFL classes? 

It's all in how you present it.

If you talk like it's public, they'll believe it's public and be afraid, very afraid. If you talk like it's private, they'll believe it's private.

Another tactic (or option for some) might be to let them link their personal blogs to some central blog or website which only they, you and their classmates are likely to access.

I had no idea this community existed otherwise I might have joined last September when I planned to introduce a class to elgg. It failed miserably. They were very reluctant to post so publicly (as they perceived it) and in the end I only had one member post anything at all.

No doubt I'll have another go when I get another class but I only have one student at this very moment and she already has an elgg blog.

Am also tired of seeing my face so many times and have resorted to a fractal I created some time ago for the time being.

One thing I found difficult was setting up multiple student accounts with elgg.

Obviously, you can get students to set up their own accounts, but I decided to do it beforehand for my Catalan Culture group to save time. Plus, previous experience had told me that if you let students set up their own accounts, then aat least 5% of them will forget their username and/or password, and it becomes a pain/time-waster.

Anyway, I went to set up accounts for my 30 students and ran into problem #1:

1) You need a unique e-mail address to set up an account on elgg. I didn't think about this. I'm used to Blogger, which allows you to use the same e-mail address no matter how many accounts you set up.

So, I had to create a unique gmail account for every student before I could create an elgg account for them. this, of course, meant it took me a lot more time to set up the elgg accounts.

I'd quite like this feature to be changed.

I've been seeing some odd characters appear in the posts made by my students(at least when I use Firefox Browser) - it seems that the apostrophe character is turned into something else. I wonder if it's related to browser use or something else.

Much as I love the idea of personalising elgg with photos of the members / friends, I can see a problem coming up.

If I start to use elgg with more students, and as some of these students become ex-students, I'm going to have a huge list of friends.

As far as managing this is concerned, I think it might become a problem.

Of course, I can as members of a certain class to join a specific community, and try to keep track of classes this way, but I'm not sure if that's enough. I guess I'll find out when I start using the system with more students after Christmas.

I also think the photos are sometimes overwhelming - I don't like the fact that I see my photo duplicated several times on my blog page - once would be enough. I do like the idea of relating the photo with comments on other people's blogs, but also think the size of the photo is too big.

I've decided to start this community to record my thoughts about using elgg with EFL/ESL students - As I've been using elgg, some thoughts have popped into my mind and before now, I didn't really know where to post them as I want to keep my personal blog clear for communicating with my students.

If there's anyone else out there using elgg in this context, please join and share your ideas and thoughts about this topic.