Please help me choose…

…which Creative Commons license should I put on my sites.

There are only five choices but they are proving difficult. They are as follows:

COMMERCIAL USES

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

Yes means:

“Commercial Use – The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, including for commercial purposes.”

Does this mean others can sell my lessons? (which I do not want as I provide them for free.)

No means:

“Non-Commercial – The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work for non-commercial purposes only.”

Does this mean language schools cannot print them and use them in class (provided my URL is on each page). Naturally, I want schools to use them.

Neither choice seems ideal.

MODIFICATIONS

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

Yes means:

“Allow Derivative Works – The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display and perform the work, as well as make derivative works based on it.”

The middle choice means:

“Share Alike – The licensor permits others to distribute derivative works only under the same license or one compatible with the one that governs the licensor’s work.”

No means:

“No Derivative Works – The licensor permits others to copy, distribute and transmit only unaltered copies of the work — not derivative works based on it.”

Do I want others to make derivative (altered) copies of my materials?

All help / suggestions appreciated regarding the pros and cons of the above five choices.

Thank you
Sean

In August 2011 I was working on a new site that I’d been wanting to develop for a year or two. I’d written half of the first lesson when I came across a site on Abraham Lincoln. I really enjoyed reading his story and searched for biographies on Wikipedia about the other early U.S. Presidents I knew (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson). I was amazed at how little I knew about U.S. history and American Presidents, so I decided it would be a cool idea to read more and make a site. And here it is:  43 x 9-page handouts, listenings and online quizzes on all U.S. Presidents :

http://www.lessonsonamericanpresidents.com/

It’s my eighth materials site and probably the one I most enjoyed putting together, simply because of what I learnt about America.

Hope you like it.

PS – I’m now back on track with the site I had been making.

I have had office hours for many years now. Until reading the article below from my guest blogger Elaine Hirsch I never really thought about how I could utilize them more to the benefit of student learning and student-teacher relations. I’m so glad Elaine shared her ideas.

One of the cornerstones of effective higher education, especially at the undergraduate level, is contact and collaboration between professors and their students. Professors who are accessible to students consistently receive higher marks on teaching evaluations and support their institution’s efforts to foster a learning community. Holding regular office hours also provides an important example for teaching assistants and master’s degree candidates who plan to pursue careers in higher education. Offering regular office hours is an essential part of the learning process that benefits both professors and their students.

The National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE) provides valuable information about student involvement to colleges and universities on a yearly basis. In recent years, the NSSE has placed stress on understanding “high-impact practices.” These are practices with highly positive affects on student retention and satisfaction. The ability to work with professors is considered a practice with particularly high impact. The NSSE has repeatedly shown that students who have access to their professors outside of regular class periods are more satisfied with their education, do better on graduate school entrance exams and are more likely to pursue opportunities to study abroad.

Students receive many benefits from office hours. Popular student blog Campussplash has highlighted a number of these benefits in a recent post. First and foremost, students who are struggling to understand complex topics in a course can gain valuable clarification from professors. Students who bring questions to professors are also more likely to be viewed favorably when the time to grade final papers and exams rolls around (teetering between an A and B? Attending office hours just might give you the small bump you need). Visiting professors during office hours offers benefits outside of individual courses, too. Students benefit from identifying faculty in the field in which they plan to study and forging relationships with them. Faculty members often know of other professionals and organizations in a student’s field and can help locate internship and employment opportunities and write letters of recommendations.

In addition to supporting student engagement and learning aims, professors and TAs also benefit from holding regular office hours. A recent study in “Observer,” the journal of the Association for Psychological Science, found that professors who use office hours effectively enjoy increased student attention during class hours. TAs and professors can use office hours to set the tone for their courses and to reinforce their roles as dedicated, caring professionals. Presenting a positive image to students also boosts course evaluation scores. These scores can be especially important to TAs who plan on pursuing faculty positions, and to faculty who are attempting to secure tenure.

Many professors and TAs dread holding office hours. They perceive them to be cumbersome and a waste of time. In contrast to their structured lectures, office hours may hold unpredictable questions and pushy students looking for answers to tests. However, many studies have shown that regular office hours benefit students and professors alike. Creating a strong presence in the classroom and on campus is an excellent way for faculty to assure their continued success in their profession. For many students, office hours are crucial to survival in a learning environment that is new and challenging. Professors and TAs who dedicate themselves to using office hours effectively are assets to their universities and students and generally enjoy long and successful careers.

Elaine Hirsch is kind of a jack-of-all-interests, from education and history to medicine and videogames. This makes it difficult to choose just one life path, so she is currently working as a writer for various education-related sites (including Master’s Degree.net) and writing about all these things instead.

Here are 13 lessons I’ve made over the years your students might like -

1. 100 questions for Santa (role play) and other activities.

2. A listening lesson with 9 pages of printable worksheets on vocabulary and other skills (plus online quizzes)

3. Printable discussion worksheet on Xmas

From ESL Holidays.com:

4. A 13-page lesson with mp3 and online quizzes on Christmas Eve

5. A 13-page lesson with mp3 and online quizzes on Christmas Day

6. A 13-page lesson with mp3 and online quizzes on Boxing Day

 Various news lessons for pre-intermediate students:

7. North-South Korea tensions over Christmas trees

8. Brits Angry at Xmas Reindeer Steaks

9. 10-Metre Chocolate Christmas Tree on Offer

10. Traffic Safety for Christmas Reindeer

News lessons for intermediate (plus) students:

11. We Wish You A Merry Something, America

12. Bratislava Xmas Market Sees Bumper Crowds

13. Cold Weather Brings Xmas Chaos to Europe

Enjoy

Prague and sick bags

Last week wasn’t a typical week in the life of this webmaster because I went to Prague for 4 days with my family. If you have never been there, go – It’s one of the world’s most beautiful cities imho.

Taking a short break (with or without la famille) always presents challenges for me. The ones that came up this time round were:

• Having to make a lesson for both my BreakingNewsEnglish and NewsEnglishLessons sites the evening before we flew AND deal with Etihad Airways’ online check-in site that didn’t work and their “Guest Affairs” hotline which was stone cold for 2 hours. Having to do this and wake up at 5.00am the next morning for a flight wasn’t the best preparation for a holiday, BUT…. it meant I didn’t have to make any lessons for two whole days.
• Wondering what kind of Internet connection there’d be in my room. I’ve never had any problems here, although I did begrudge having to pay for wifi in my room in Cyprus this summer and in a London Heathrow hotel last summer. They charge around $10 a day, which is an extortionate and wholly unjustifiable $3,650 a year – a major rip-off. I guess I’m spoilt as wifi is generally a given in UAE hotels. Anyway, my wifi in Prague was fantastic. We stayed at the wonderful Arcadia Residence in the Old Town Square – highly recommended. The apartment owner had written down the wifi password and left it on the dining room table for us.
• How to survive without Twitter for large parts of the holiday. I don’t have an Internet-enabled mobile phone (keep that one quiet) and so have to rely on waiting my turn for the kids to finish playing on the computer after a day’s sightseeing.
• Fitting in making and uploading two lessons while in Prague. I always hate this part of a “holiday”. Luckily this time round, my body clock was on Abu Dhabi time every morning in Prague, which meant I woke up at around 4.00am. This gave me enough time to get most of a lesson done before everyone else woke up three hours later. The tough thing about doing this is that it’s dark in the room and I can’t turn the light on (to avoid waking the family) so I have to lean the laptop screen forward to be able to see the keyboard – slows you down a bit. Of course, the fun bit is finding your glasses in a room you’re not used to and cannot see your way around. I managed to do the bulk of two lessons before breakfast on two different days and upload them after coming back from the 8-hour hike around the city.

Prague Castle from Charles Bridge

So Prague was outrageously pretty and sophisticated. The plane for the six-hour return flight had no TV screen so I couldn’t watch any movies – boo!!! Which meant I had lots of time to make some notes on a new project. Thank goodness for sick bags as I didn’t put a notebook in my computer case. Couldn’t use the computer because it only has 30 minutes of battery in it. Managed to fit quite a lot of thinking onto the waxy bag.

And so back home. Spent half a day catching up on mail, tweets, Facebook comments, etc. and then it was time for another Breaking News lesson (they come around quickly every three days). Also tried to move forward with the new website I’m hoping to upload at the end of this month. This site hijacked an earlier site I was working on, which I’m very excited about. That one should be online in early 2012.

Added the notes I made on the plane to the lengthy to-do list on my desk that grows faster than I can tick things off on it.

And then it was time for another weekend.

If anyone out there wants to share a week in their life, I’d be happy to put it here as a guest post.

Love the fact the museum is above McDonald's.

Enjoy

Here are 20 questions from my ESL Discussions site.

1. Do you celebrate Halloween?
2. Do you think all countries should celebrate Halloween?
3. Do you think it’s dangerous for children to go trick-or-treating?
4. Why don’t Christians celebrate Halloween?
5. What do you think is the best costume for Halloween?
6. Do you think Halloween was better a few decades ago or is it better now?
7. How old is too old to go trick-or-treating?
8. Do you think Halloween is scary?
9. What would an alien think of humans if it came to Earth and saw Halloween?
10. What do you think the black and orange colors of Halloween mean?
11. What do you think about Halloween?
12. What do you know about the history of Halloween?
13. How does Halloween affect American culture?
14. What do pumpkins have to do with Halloween?
15. Why do people trick-or-treat on Halloween?
16. Do you think it’s dangerous these days to open your door to a trick-or-treater?
17. How did Halloween get its name?
18. What’s the best Halloween movie you’ve seen?
19. What are the best Halloween games?
20. What is the best Halloween food?

And here are another 80 sent to me here or on Twitter. Thank you for sending me these questions:

1. Why couldn’t carved pumpkins be used for Halloween in Ireland in the 14th century? *
2. What is your preferred method for eating candy corn?
3. How would a person inspect the candy a hold brings home from trick or treating to be reasonably assured it is safe for consumption?
4. Candy, toothbrushes, or pencils: which one is the best choice to hand put at Halloween?
5. If you were to visit a haunted attraction in Halloween, where would it be and why?
6. Has anyone ever played  pranks on you? If yes, How did you react?
7. If you were to add another symbol to Halloween, what would it be?
8. If you owned a Halloween costume shop, which costumes would you sell?
9. What would happen according to a 19th century belief, if unmarried women sat in a darkened room and gazed into a mirror on a Halloween night?
10. Which is the strangest Halloween costume you have ever seen?
11. Where do you usually buy your Halloween costumes?
12. What wouldn’t you like to get on a trick-or-treat?
13. What do you think of religious schools who ban Halloween? (happens at mine)
14. What vegetable was originally used for jack-o’-lanterns? The answer: turnips.
15. A hair-splitting question. What is wrong with a jack-o-lantern? **
16. Which Halloween activity: ‘trick or treat’ vs ‘guising’ has any real cultural significance?
17. Have you ever eaten pumpkin? Did you like it? Why (not)?
18. How do you say Halloween in your language?
19. Where in the world do people have picnics by the graves of relatives? ***
20. Where in the world do people light a fire and place chairs for deceased people around it? ****
21. Where in the world do people put knives away before going to bed so that the spirits of the dead don’t get hurt? *****
22. Where in the world do people celebrate a festival similar to Halloween in August? ******
23. Where in the world do people eat a type of pastry called Bones of the Holy? *******
24. What is the trick of trick-or-treat?
25. Do you decorate your house for Hallowe’en?
26. Have you seen a Halloween movie?
27. If so, which one?
28. What kind of movie is it?
29. What’s the plot of the movie?
30. Did you enjoy it?
31. What is your favourite Halloween party food?
32. When do Halloween items come out in the shops in your country?
33. Can you describe your ideal Halloween party?
34. Can you think of a word connected to HALLOWEEN using each of the letters in order? (Eg Hallow, Apple, Lantern, L…, . Orange, Witch, E……, E…., N………)
35. What do you know about this spelling – Hallowe’en?
36. Are local traditions changing because of globalisation? Do you see this as a positive or negative thing?
37. What can you do with a carved pumpkin after Halloween?
38. What do you think people do on November 1 in Lithuania? ********
39. Have you ever been in a haunted house e.g. at a party or at an amusement park?
40. Have you ever bobbed for apples?
41. Do you believe in ghosts?
42. What was the best costume you ever made?
43. Do you prefer homemade or store-bought costumes?
44. How do Hallowe’en and harvest celebrations overlap?
45. Do you prefer friendly or scary pumpkins?
46. Do you prefer the face paint and make-up or the costumes best?
47. Is Halloween like Christmas in the sense that it is now celebrated in countries where it did not originate?
48. How do you feel about the word ‘celebrate’ being applied to Halloween?
49. What word can we use instead of ‘celebrate’ to mean ‘I do/don’t celebrate Halloween’?
50. Do you believe in ghosts?
51. Would you walk around your town at night on your own on Halloween?
52. Do / Would you always open your door to trick or treaters?
53. What would you do if a trick or treater got nasty?
54. What do you think of the idea of “Happy Halloween” cards to send to people?
55. What’s the best Halloween activity?
56. What’s the most scared you’ve ever been?
57. Who would you like to haunt and why?
58. Should Halloween costumes only be about scary things, or can they be any kind of costume?
59. What do you think of the idea of “trick or treat or money for a charity” as a way of making Halloween more useful?
60. What’s the best song for Halloween?
61. Is it a spooky coincidence that the world’s 7-billionth person will be born on Halloween?
62. Why pumpkins?
63. Do you save the seeds from the pumpkin to eat or to plant?
64. Do you bake pumpkin seeds in the oven?
65. Do you use spicy or sweet seasonings with pumkin seeds?
66. Trick of treat?
67. Halloween is a great tradition in Scotland. What is the Scottish link to Halloween?
68. What fruit is in season in Europe at Halloween and therefore commonly used to fill the looty bags of the revellers?
69. Some countries like Spain do not traditionally celebrate Halloween. However, it is becoming a very popular “imported” celebration. Why do you think Halloween is so popular?
70. What must everyone know about Halloween?
71. What is the story behind the legend of Jack-o-lantern and where did it get its name?
72. Is Halloween celebrated on the same date all over the world?
73. When did Halloween start to be celebrated?
74. What is the connection between Salem and Halloween?
75. Should Halloween be a national public holiday?
76. Are witches around nowadays?
77. Which famous person would you like to go trick-or-treating with, and why?
78. Ghost hunting programmes on TV – Are they real or fake?
79. Should Halloween be “celebrated” only on Friday or Saturday, and not the 31st of October?
80. What would you do if you saw a ghost?

This will be the fourth “100 Questions” set I’ve done. Many thanks to @vickyloras, @clivehawk, @eltbakery (Eduardo Santos), @derekrobertson, Gita Assefi, Arianna Basaric, Runswbooks, @MarylouMurray, Janet Bianchini, Marisa Pavan, William Chamberlain, Hannah,  esljokes.com, GetWordLayer, Marylou, Virginia, Louise Alix, english-teacher, Lisa Beebe and @English247 (Sue Lyon-Jones) and @nickelnoisy.

I also made

• 100 Questions for Santa Claus
• 100 Questions for my Valentine
• 100 Questions for Prince William and Kate Middleton

Perhaps I should start a new site

Halloween and me

I’m English so I don’t know a lot about Halloween. I knew from when I was a kid that it was an American thing that involved pumpkins. Then I found out about trick or treat and wearing costumes. I loved the idea of dressing up in scary costumes and walking around the streets. Another early memory I have is watching the horror movie ‘Halloween’ round my friend’s house on video. I remember being scared to walk back home that night. The first time I took part in Halloween was at a school party in Japan. I shaved my head, covered it in white face paint and wrapped myself from head to toe in toilet paper. Riding a train to Osaka for the party dressed as a mummy was great fun. I still need to find out more about the history of Halloween though.

(A 9-page listening lesson with printable classroom handouts and online activities is here.)

About Halloween

This is taken from my ESL Holiday Lessons site. More materials on the text, a listening and online stuff here.

Halloween is celebrated on October the 31st every year. It originated from a pagan holiday and the Christian holiday of All Saints’ Day. The name Halloween is a shortened version of All Hallows’ Eve. Today, it is more of a fun day for children and has largely lost its religious roots. Halloween is probably most famous in the U.S.A. Irish immigrants took it to America in the mid-1600s and it slowly spread across the country. Halloween is not celebrated in many countries around the world although many people know about it. Some Christians are not so happy that people celebrate Halloween. They believe the holiday is un-Christian because of its origin as a pagan “festival of the dead.”

Halloween has many easily identifiable symbols. The colours orange and black are widely used. In particular, orange pumpkins and fires and black witches, cats and costumes are common features of this day. One of the biggest Halloween activities is trick-or-treating. This is when children knock on doors and ask for a small gift. If they don’t get anything, they’ll play a trick on the person who opens the door. Food also plays a big part of Halloween. Toffee apples are very popular and so is anything made from pumpkin. Halloween is also a popular topic for Hollywood. Many horror movies have been made about it. Because of this, Halloween is now known in many countries that never actually celebrate it.

Happy Halloween, and don’t forget to send me questions

Answers to some of the questions

* Carved pumpkins could not be used for Halloween in Ireland in the 14th century because pumpkins are native to America and did not really get cultivated in Europe till the 16th century.
** An apostrophe is missing.
*** Mexico
**** Czech Rebublic
***** Germany
****** Korea
******* Spain
******** go to the cemetery and light candles. Is it a public holiday? (yes!) In Lithuania, the night of November 1 is All Soul’s Day. It is a reflective day, not sombre or spooky but a dignified time to remember. It is really beautiful to see the cemeteries at night.

The first guest post on my site

By Natalie Hunter

Many people have seen the caption contest in the back of the New Yorker, which presents a single frame of a comic and invites readers to put some words in the mouth of a character in that comic. Expanding this exercise beyond a single frame can make for very good English practice though. Although many people think of comics as puerile, they have become increasingly artistic and well written over the years. People like Scott McCloud and organizations like the National Association of Comic Art Educators (NACAE) are doing amazing work at teaching people how to tell stories using this visual art. Students can go to an online school to study comics, and thanks to the Internet more people can publish comics than ever before. The great thing about this is is that there is a huge resource of comics out there to rewrite in a classroom setting.

Rewritten comics are useful for teaching English because they give a framework for dialogue, but one that is quite malleable. A single comic may yield drastically different stories, even among students with the same level of English. Plus, students will enjoy reading the comics of other students, which can be much more productive than just listening to another student recite a dialogue from memory.

The first thing to do is read a lot of webcomics and make sure that they will fit your purpose. Kate Beaton is a great example of what to look for in a comic: the stories are self contained, the characters are expressive, and perhaps most importantly she is completely fine with having classes rewrite her comics. It is unlikely that you will run into copyright issues as you won’t be publishing your students’ comics for money, and many webcomic artists are very open about copyright issues, but if you think there will be a problem with the artist you should contact them yourself. On the other hand, comics that are mainly just talking faces, have no discernible action, are part of a continued storyline, or are just stick figures may be much harder for students to write a dialogue for. The best way to test the usability of a comic is to write a story for it yourself. If you can make something up that is different from the original but still makes sense given the actions of the characters, then you’ve got a winner.

Once you’ve got your comic, use a photo editing program to remove the text, or print it out and white out the dialogue before you make copies. If your students are just beginning to use English, it may be easiest to take out the words from the dialogue that they have learned and let them fill it in. Once they’ve learned sentence structure and grammar though, feel free to erase all the dialogue and let them go at it. The more panels a comic has, the more difficult it is to keep up a cohesive narrative, so keep this in mind when you are choosing a comic for a class. Use comics that have particular actions to complement specific lessons, like one with people at a bar for a lesson on introducing yourself, or another one that shows people voting to enforce the vocabulary of elections. It is also important to allow the students to critique one another’s comics in order to promote proper grammar, narrative structures, and spelling.

Comics combine visual creativity with narrative practice in English, and the creation of one can be a fun and rewarding task. Rewriting comics is a medium students of all abilities and ages find easy to engage with, perhaps even more so than normal worksheets. It’s a perfect activity to restore flagging attention in a classroom. And, once your students have gotten used to writing comic narrative, or if you want to shake things up a little, there are also several resources available online for creating brand-new comic or animated narratives. Pixton is one of my favourites for comic creation, and I have heard good things about Make Beliefs Comix- both of these support multiple language entry, so they’re useful for teaching other languages or practicing translation as well. One of the coolest programs though for creating narratives is probably GoAnimate, which allows you to create animated movies with recorded voices, which can be a lot less stressful a project for language practice than standing in front of a class and reciting sentences from memory. Have fun!

About the writer

Natalie Hunter grew up wanting to be a teacher, and is addicted to learning and research. As a result she is grateful for the invention of the internet because it allows her to spend some time outside, rather than just poring through books in a library. She is fascinated by the different methodologies for education at large today, and particularly by the advent of online education. She also loves to travel and learn via interaction with other people and cultures.

7. Discussion

Create your own discussions/questions tailored to what’s happening around the world. Quite often they students are unaware of the bad things happening in the world so creating a discussion that raises their awareness of this can start their interest in different issues.

The following questions about the East Africa famine are based on information from the front page of UNICEF.

Instead of you writing the questions, give students a blank template for then to write. The questions my students write are usually a lot more original than mine.

8. Inter-cultural communication

Technology affords many teachers the opportunity to really talk to the world and get to understand other cultures. Try to team up with teachers and classes in other countries. Sites like Twitter are great places to start to arrange inter-class chats / discussions.

9. Support the less fortunate of the world

• Write to people in troubled situations or countries with letters of support and friendship. Start a pen pal project with people in another country.
• Skype them.
• Set up a web page that shows you care about people in less fortunate situations than yours.
• Create a Voxopop or Voicethread page for your students to reach out.
• Get students to tweet their support when people rise up against repression or show they are not alone when a natural disaster strikes.
• Provide opportunities to give. There are so many charities and organizations out there that need our support. Putting the logo, URL or live link on your materials will encourage students to give. Make it relevant to the content in the materials. Every little helps.

10. Student campaigns

• Make writing activities real by getting students to write to political leaders, UN representatives and other key figures who can help bring about change.
• Encourage students to use social media to make a difference. One tweet on Twitter or comment on Facebook can get a multinational scrambling into action to change its ways. Encourage students to believe they can make a difference.
• Get students involved in a project in which they create an awareness campaign – they have to make the posters, design the logos and website, create the aims and ideas, etc.

If you have success with any of the above, please drop by again and leave a comment to let us know about it.

News agencies, newspapers and news channels can be biased or sensationalist, choosing to tell what they think their audience wants to hear instead of the truth. They often lie, play into the hands of political parties, spurt out government propaganda, or misrepresent the facts.

This is often damaging and changes the world in a negative way

How?

• It makes people believe things that are not true
• It propagates hatred of others
• It fuels conflict
• It tarnishes whole cultures, religions, nations…

We see, hear and read examples of this everywhere:

• Our own press (wherever we are in the world) is driven by political agendas. In many countries the press is used by governments to maintain power.
• Dictators use the press as a tool to sow seeds of mistrust, fear and hatred of neighbours or each other.
• Or the media just wants to paint a more dramatic story to sell more newspapers. Japan’s nuclear crisis turned into into a scaremongering-fest for the press with headlines of “Armageddon”, “Apocalypse”, “Worse than Chernobyl”, etc.
• Many newspapers see a good story in hurting people’s careers, lives and reputations as a good way to increase sales. The truth often comes second.
• Newspapers influenced by political parties tell people how to vote.

One of the things teachers can do is to bring into the classroom different stories and get students to question the truthfulness or integrity of reporting of the news. Foster a sense of “media-bias literacy”.

How?

1. With lower levels, we can bring in a news story from two very different perspectives and let the students find differences. Get them to choose which country’s media each report is from.
2. Ask students if they think the story is 100% true. Get them to provide a percentage of the “falseness”.
3. With monolingual students, show them a report from their country’s media (if there are English-language newspapers available) and the same news from a less partisan country’s media.
4. Ask students to find two sides of an argument in a news report.
5. Ask pairs/groups of students to list three parts of a story they think might not be totally true.
6. Get students to find (or you provide them with) synonyms for more emotive words (terrorist, apocalypse, collapse, chaos, thugs…) and ask them to swap them with less loaded alternatives to see how the tone (and perhaps the truth) of the text changes.
7. Look for hidden agendas in stories on the environment. Why might a news report be defending logging or the mining of a protected area?
8. Get students to rewrite or summarise an article in a fairer, more balanced way.
9. Get students to write a letter to the Editor to point out a report’s bias.
10. Analyse the headline – marks out of 10 for sensationalism or bias.
11. Analyse the headline, accompanying photos and captions for nastiness or silliness (especially with tabloids.
12. Write down some ideas from the article you think are biased and get students to find them.
13. Ask students to debate both sides (or the alternative side if not given) of a story.
14. Ask students to discuss what the bias is and why, and what harm it might do.

Getting students to question what’s in the news may go a small way in creating less negativity and more understanding towards others.

I’d be happy to post your comments on ideas you have for introducing bias in the media in the classroom.

If you try any of the above ideas, please let us know here.

The Internet is a great medium to get things changed and flex your muscles. It can greatly reduce the power balance between the powerful and mighty corporations, and Jo Average – almost to the degree that Ms/Mr Average is stronger. A single tweet, a comment on Facebook or a blog post can change the world. We do have power to get things changed.

Three examples

a) Tweeting for Rwanda

Make writing activities real by getting students to write to, tweet, comment on the Facebook page of political leaders, UN representatives, business leaders  and other key figures who can help bring about change or who are doing great wrong. One great example of this was Tara Kendyle’s project in which her class http://www.tm4rwanda.com/. In Tara’s words:

In April of 2010, we started a student project to spread awareness of the Rwandan genocide that occurred in 1994. My students and I wanted to remember the victims of Rwanda because there is no “real” memorial here in the U.S. Our goal was to receive 1 Million Tweets in 100 days in remembrance of those who died at the hands of hate. The project earned us a complimentary ad valued at over $50,000 in The USA Today newspaper to spread our message of remembrance and peace … While we did not reach our goal of 1 Million Tweets, our lives were changed. My 23 teens now know their voices make a difference. These students are changing the world!

Copyright - http://www.tm4rwanda.com/

b) The Arab Spring

No real need here to explain how social media has had a major impact in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, Yemen…

c) Britain’s “News Of The World” newspaper

Britain’s top-selling Sunday newspaper closed down after a flood of revelations that newspaper workers hacked the phones of murder victims, terror victims, and the bereaving families of military killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as politicians, sports starts, singers…). The British public were appalled at this. A torrent of tweets were aimed at the newspaper’s advertisers. Many of these succumbed to this (among other pressure) and decided to withdraw their contracts with the newspaper.

So how do teachers (and students) flex their cyber-muscle?

You can probably think of dozens more examples of how the use of social media and the Internet can and has brought about change.  Here are a few we could use (carefully and with students likely to be interested) in the classroom

1. Discuss with students how social media can and does make a difference.
2. Encourage students to join Facebook groups
3. Show students what a hashtag does on Twitter and get them following or using some.
4. Discuss how effective it is to post comments on the Facebook sites of companies or people doing wrong. (My experience has been that companies take negative comments seriously and will quickly start addressing issues).
5. Get students involved in their own campaign for change, like Tara’s above. The students make the online posters, design the logos and website, create the aims and ideas, etc. – all in English.
6. Get students blogging! When they are given a voice and an audience you start to see their ideas taken seriously as well as spreading throughout society. You can do this with kids of all ages. (Thanks to Pernille Ripp for this suggestion.)
7. Students visit http://freerice.com/   It’s a small way to make a difference with world hunger, yet students can benefit from it too by improving their vocabulary. (Thanks to HSeslteacher for this suggestion.)

More?

I’m not overly happy with this post as I think I could have thought of more ways for teachers and students to use the Internet to get things changed. If you can think of more ways, please comment and I’ll add them to the list.