Decided that I have lurked for too long.

I'm Karen Haines, teaching in NZ and working with students who are doing intensive English study before they can go to mainstream academic classes here. I came late to this workshop at EVO2006 as I was doing a couple of others (podcasting and BAW) and it all took too much time!

I've enjoyed blogging all last year in one way or other with my students. This term I decided to try to use pictures more, so each week I get my students to comment on a Picture Post. This is a picture that I think is interesting and will cause comment, and I am slowly learning which pictures work better than others. The first two I chose were quite abstract and I was delighted with the students comments. More recently they have been less forthcoming and more in 'how this picture affects me' mode perhaps, which has been interesting. The last picture I chose was too big to show on screen, but the link is there and we actually looked at it briefly in class. From a language perspective, I wanted to get away from essays/reports etc and encourage students to write differently.

If you're interested the link is http://upperint.blogspot.com/

I shall continue to lurk...