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Sunday, December 21, 2008

Best Group Blog

Many thanks from the English Department to all visitors to this blog, including pupils, parents, staff, Old Columbans, Frog Bloggers, fellow teachers in Ireland, and others who voted for us in the 2008 Edublog Awards, and kindly gave us an early Christmas present, the Best Group Blog Award. The full list of award-winners is well worth checking out (as well as the nomination list, of course).

At the start of the year, when we reached our 300th post, we listed the material we'd posted since starting. Here's an update, a year later, in the 530th post:
  • 128 poems by pupils at St Columba's
  • 92 essays (both literary and creative) and stories by pupils, including Extended Essays, TY work portfolio pieces and book reports
  • 162 book recommendations by pupils and staff
  • 46 posts about interesting sites and articles on the Web
  • 61 posts about plays in the College
  • 18 reviews of plays and other events by pupils
  • 15 evocations of Christmas Past from the recent Everyday Writes project
  • 53 notices about other school events, including debates, speech competitions concerts and competitions
  • 41 Poems of the Week and associated material, and also the 'Poetry Aloud' national competition
  • 21 news items about theatre visits
  • 15 items about talks and lectures
  • 63 posts about English school prizes
  • our full official Department of Education and Science Inspection report
  • as well as a lot of other material - photo albums from plays, visits to famous authors' graves (Keats, Beckett, Hopkins), news of Old Columbans, plenty on new books in our Library, an MP3 Shakespeare project, a pupil's interview with Jennifer Johnston, 'Teaching English' magazine, 'Conference and Common Room' magazine, the Library magazine 'The Submarine', and much more.
  • plus over 125 recommended links in our sidebar.
  • and our first book, Going Places, with highlights of writing by pupils and staff on the blog, published in May this year.
We have plenty of plans for innovation for 2009, including a start on podcasting. Meanwhile, all the best for the coming holiday season to all our visitors.

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