The 2011 Edublog Awards – My nomonations:

Best student blog: http://andreaismrsenglish.blogspot.com/

Mrs English’s blog is a fun and inspiring blog! She is good at keeping her readers posted, and her blog posts are interesting. The blog also has many cool features like Political jokes and cheeky quotes. Check out Mrs English’s blog!

Best teacher blog: https://annmic.wordpress.com/

Ann Michaelsen has an excellent blog! Ann is my English teacher, and therefore we use her blog in the teaching. I find the blog very helpful and inspiring. No doubt that Ann Michaelsen has the best teacher blog, you should visit it!

Best group blog: http://plpnetwork.com/category/voices/page/2/

Voices from the Learning Revolution blog – a PLP Network project – is a group blog of teachers writing with great detail about their instructional practices – with many examples from the classroom.

Have you nominated your favourites yet?

To blog or not to blog – That is the question

In our English class we have our own blog, and we also have our own twitter now. Using social media in teaching gives us a bit of variation, and personally I think it is a good way to learn. By having a blog, and having to write blog posts almost every week is a nice way for me to maintain my writing skills in English. It is something different. But sometimes I miss the old fashion teaching, when the teacher talked and wrote down thing on the blackboard and the students took notes. I don’t understand all the fuzz about the schools having to modernize the school system. Of course we have to keep up with technology and vary the teaching, but too much variation can be confusing. I like having a blog, and twitter, but sometimes I wish we could do something else than just writing blog posts. But blogging have been a positive experience, today I found out that just this last month almost 200 people have been on my blog. The thing that I found especially cool is that I have readers from many different countries; USA, Russia, Brazil, Malaysia, Germany, Greece, The Netherlands and South – Korea. So, all in all, I enjoy having a blog, and now also Twitter, but I hope that we won’t focus too much on social media and this whole new way of teaching. 

What do you think about using blog in teaching?

News of the World

We have heard about journalists, paparazzies and tabloids that are willing to cross moral borders just to get their hands on a juicy story that will sell. The consequences have many times been serious, for example princess Diana’s death. The British newspaper “News of the World” has once more shown the world how dirty the digging for stories can become.

News of the World used to be the biggest selling English language newspaper in the world, selling almost 3 million copies every week.  The newspaper was founded in 1843, but had to shut down after 168 years of publishing when the police revealed that the paper had hacked more than 4000 phones and bribed police officers.

It was the kidnapping and murder of thirteen year old Milly Dowler in 2002 that started it all. Milly’s family sued News of the World several years later, when it was revealed that the newspaper had hacked Milly’s phone, read and deleted messages after her disappearance. The paper had let the family believe that Milly was still alive by deleting messages to make place for new ones, their action was described as evil and inhumane. After this scandalous exposure the accusations against the paper became many. News of the World had not only hacked into celebrities’ and the British royal family’s phones, but also the phones belonging to families of soldiers who had died in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They had bugged the phones of the ones who were left behind after the terror bombing in London 7^th of July 2005. News of the World made up their own news.

On the 7^th of July this year James Murdoch, the owner of the tabloid, made public that the edition about to be published some days later would be their last one. - News of the World’s mission was to make people responsible for their actions, but failed to do so for themselves, says James Murdoch. The staff at News of the World will be brought to court. It is still unknown what the tabloid will be punished for and how, but as the list of crimes and violations of individual rights is long, they probably won’t get away easy.

Sources:

http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/verden/1.7708451

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World

http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/artikkel.php?artid=10080023

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_of_the_World#Phone_hacking_scandal

http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/artikkel.php?artid=10080222