At this time, we live in a world of permanent change where tecchnology is pervasive and our audiences (our studentes) belong to the digital native generation, i.e., they were born and brought up in a technology -dominated environment. However, they find themselves inmersed in an unfamiliar environment when it comes to education. The botom line is that in most Latin American countries educational paradigms are rooted in ideologies and ideas that were thought for 19th c. contexts. As a result, methodologies / practices have become obsolete for the majority of our students who don't seem to find their expectations met. Fortunately, things are gradually changing for the better.
We teachers belong to the digital immigrant portion of the population, i.e., we had to learn to make technology part of our lives. Nontheless, many of us are learning to "speak" our students' language (we will always have an accent, though :) ), we are learning to master technology to make it part of the teaching-learning processes. This is just the beginning of a long lasting journey, but the results have shown to be really promising so far!
Personally, I believe that blogs are marvellous web 2.0 tools for implementing in the EFL classroom. At the university, we have been using them for a couple of years now in combination with CMSs such as schoology or Moodle as part of a blended learning experience. Their main purpose was to provide extra reading and writing opportunities for the students. We've also implemented them as portfolios for their writing assignments.
