Getting started

The general idea is that you create your blog in your own way, but here are some guidelines:

• Choose a title that has something (more or less anything) to do with you and/ or the subject International English.
• Spend some time figuring out the layout of your blog.
• Remember relevant illustrations for every post. You are encouraged to take your own photos!
• If you find images online, make sure to use images that you are allowed to share (for example, images on flickr are marked with symbols that tell you whether you can use them or not).
• Give all your posts a title.
• You do not have to share personal information (that is not the point of this blog), but you should aim to give your blog its own "character".
• Try to be creative!

The blog you now create is supposed to be a place where you reflect on topics that have to do with International English. In other words, you can write about anything from the English language to nuclear weapons, the media, the environment, the challenges of multiculuralism, a novel you just read or a film that you would like to recommend - and so much more. You can choose to only do the blog tasks I give you here, but I also hope that some of you eventually will begin to write relevant posts on your own initiative as well.  Your blog will be assessed with one grade in the first term and one in the second, and this will count towards the written grade in English. Good luck blogging! (The photo is my own.)

Why blog in International English?

...you may ask. I am tempted to reply with the title of a Cranberries (Irish band from the 90s) album that was very popular when I went to upper secondary myself: "Everybody else is doing it, so why don't we?". However, I think I can offer a more meaningful explanation than that. Obviously, in order to improve your writing in English, you have to write. So far you have handed in answers to the assignments to me, your teacher, and me alone. This is of course fine, but quite often what you hand in are interesting thoughts and perspectives on the topics and questions thrown at you, and I think you should share these thoughts with the world, or at least the others in your English class. I have previously used blogs with my Norwegian classes and what I have found is that blogs help students to:

• develop their digital competence.
• create multimodal texts.
• reflect on the topics and texts we work on in class.
• express thoughts and opinions.
• receive formal and informal feedback from teacher and fellow students.
• share with others.
• create texts that are more creative than more traditional essays.
• write more and thereby improve their writing. Creative and critical writing is important both in education and future jobs. You can read more about student blogging here (in Norwegian).
• take an interest in as well as learn from what fellow students write.

Your blogs will also give me as a teacher a more complete impression of you as students. Besides, International English is a subject that really invites us to gather, share, discuss and comment on information from various sources off and online. We are supposed to work with complex topics such as multiculturalism, intercultural communication, international challenges and the role of the media on the global scene. What is more logical than exploring these topics online? I hope your blogs can serve as a more meaningful and authentic context for your texts than our more traditional learning platform and I also hope you see the advantages in being able to combine your texts with images, videos and links to relevant material online. I am looking forward to reading what you have to say!

(The photo is my own.)

Welcome to our class blog interaction

Welcome to this International English class blog. Here I will share tips about relevant websites, interesting books and anything else that might be useful for you when working on this subject. Our subject page on itslearning is still our main "hub", but this blog and our facebook group will serve as additional (hopefully supporting) arenas. Soon I will post blog assignments here, and you are to do these assignments (some optional and some compulsory) by writing posts on your own International English blogs. I hope you will enjoy following this and each other's blogs this schoolyear.

I found this photo on creativecommons.org and this is the link.