The Joy of Homework

In Little Tibet -picture by KRB

Coming up with new initiatives to highlight blog posts and bloggers is something which has spurred Darren Elliot of the Lives of Teachers in his recent post "Blog Archives: A vast pool of human knowledge, neglected". There is a huge array of amazing posts, just waiting to be re-discovered. Where does one begin? Well, I decided I would start off in a blog's archive, find an interesting post and then find another blog via the comments or the sidebar of said blog. Seems like a lot of fun to me! So,what better way to kick off than by delving into the recesses of Darren's very own blog and seeing what happens? I limited myself by time factor, otherwise I could easily have spent all afternoon doing this lovely "homework" instead of dutifully moving furniture in rooms at home.

The Pulling Factor
For me the title of a post is the pulling factor. I'm a sucker for eyecatching titles when flicking through blogs. So browsing through the innermost archives of the Lives of Teachers I spotted September 2009. I immediately went for this title "the land of do as you please". It certainly didn't disappoint. One question written four times for dramatic effect. A reflection on the best way to teach and also some great follow-up comments. Wonderful stuff!

"Does Hitchcock direct your lessons" was a post I was compelled to read via The Tesla Coil blog. It certainly lived up to expectations. The quote "that strange phenonemum known as the student who happily does their homework" caught my eye. This is what I am doing now, happily doing my "homework".

Reading through the comments on that post led me to Vicki Hollet's lovely "Learning to speak 'Merican" blog. Browsing through the archives I found "Sorry, I'm English" from April 2009. I enjoyed reading about experiments carried out on the "English sorry reflex". I looked at the comments section and hey presto!! I came across one of my favourite blogs "Bits'n'Bobs, Show and Tell"! Now Chris is a Master Title Organiser and each one of his posts comes with an unusual title which compels you to read further.

We have come full circle twice in just 5 clicks. "Final Warnings? written yesterday contains a reference to Janet's Abruzzo Edublog and a comment from Vicki. It is indeed a small world!! From Chris' sidebar I linked to Mike Harrison's blog, which contains this "Got to do some research today" post. In turn I had originally found this link via Twitter this morning and I duly tweeted "will be following suit today!". So here it all is.

Final Delves of the Day
Delving into my very own sidebar my penultimate link is to Zarco English Tool of the Day. I love reading through Alex Francisco's informative posts written in Portuguese. I went straight for the archive posts in December 2009. I picked on Pixuffle.
I learned about a very interesting tool which allows you to alter photos. The photo at the top is what was created in seconds following from Alex's excellent link and tutorial. I will finish off with another Pixuffled photo below. Cheers, Alex!

All Credit Due
It is impossible to go through and highlight all the blogs I like. I would just like to say that each and every blog is amazing per se. To write a blog means to give up a part of oneself. Sometimes one's body and soul can go into a post. It's what makes each blog unique. Let me finish off with a totally NEW blog for me. One which had me totally engrossed in a gap fill activity. Listening to a song in Greek and filling in the gaps to the missing words. I loved it because I was doing the activity from a student's point of view. I wanted to listen to it again (and again) in order to

• listen to the pronunciation
• read the words
• guess the meaning
• think of how to spell the missing words
• predict what the missing words meant
• brush up my rusty Greek

The blog is called Istologio and the song which I enjoyed listening to is "Vosporos". It was a challenging activity and many thanks to the blog owner. This blog is for students of the Greek language, culture and history.