Thing 3: Blog - What Is It Good For?

I've been blogging on a personal level for a long time, but I don't think my students will get a lot out of my usual ramblings. No, for my students I will need new, more academically-oriented ramblings. What if my students don't have easy access to the internet, though? We're talking a lot about using Web 2.0 material and so on, but the simple fact is in many parts of the country, people don't have ready access to Web 1.0. It is easy for technophiles to forget that not everyone keeps up with the times - I myself only do so by plunging further and further into student loan debt.

With that caveat out of the way, I do think I could use this blog to enrich my students' experience. It'd be a bad idea, I think, to post mandatory class assignments online, but auxiliary stuff would be great. I can easily see posting a sort of "Latin Quote of the Week" and encouraging students to not only consider the linguistic aspects of it but also to discuss its meaning. In my own studies I have found Roman writers are surprisingly applicable in our own day and age - Cicero has a lot to say on the ethics of waging war, for example, and Catullus's poetry would ring as true with modern American teenagers as it did with ancient Romans.

There could also be a few bonus assignments posted online - "translate your favorite song into Latin," for example. Then students could not only share their results (which are bound to be entertaining), but they could help each other with tricky parts (and get my help, too) through comments.