Blogs & Wikis for Class?

Last week I was handed an intensive 3-week writing course that will begin in December. Forty students meeting three times a week adds up to a lot of writing to review. In search of an online alternative, I spent the afternoon searching for a way that students can post their homework to a blog or wiki, revise it as the course proceeds, and view and comment on their classmates' work.

wikispaces.com may be a solution but I'm a bit concerned that it involves too much tech and tech English for my students. I don't want to have to spend a week training them how to navigate a site just to be able to turn in their homework -- especially since we don't have computers in the classroom. Of course, emailing it is one solution and we've used it successfully in the past, but I like the idea of them being able to see their progress, work together with their classmates and show off their work to others by sending them a link.

Any suggestions? Anyone know of any sites out there that might work? And students -- do you think this would work or is it too complicated? Would you like to do assignments online?

Typing IPA symbols in Word 2007

fə'netɪks

Since switching from Word 2003 to 2007, I've been trying to find a simpler way to type IPA symbols than Alt-N-U-M and then searching through all the symbols. Uniqoder worked fine in 2003, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to work in 2007. There's an online editor where you can type and then copy & paste, but I was looking for something to use offline.

After a bit of searching, I found several options in this document on the website of Professor John Wells at University College London. I've opted for the AutoCorrect method. It took a while to set up, but I think it will be the easiest to use. I set up some easy-to-remember shortcuts for common IPA symbols (\sw\ for ə, \ch\ for ʧ and \sh\ for ʃ -- not exact, I know, but easy for me to remember). For the more esoteric symbols, like ʊə, I used example words (\tour\). It may take a while to get them down, but at least I'll always have an example word ready when I need one in class.

Since the CELTA course I've become more comfortable using IPA and this should help me get them into my printed lesson plans.