Hi everyone. My son woke with a pretty bad hálsbolga today, so I won´t be at school. 

Thank you to those of you who sent me your essays by Friday midnight. I will turn them back to you with some feedback by tomorrow, if all goes as planned. 

Thanks also for the comments and insights on your blogs about the two videos. I´m glad that in most cases at least one, if not both, of the speakers were inspirational.

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Now I´d like everyone to visit each other´s blogs. Please go to my blog English 503 and visit all the links in the left sidebar.

Find the "Follow" button on each blog and click it. You can also add each other´s blogs to your blog list, like I´ve done on my site.

I´d like you to comment on each blog, even if it´s just to say Hi : )

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We are supposed to start on Short Stories and Poems this week. You can probably guess what I´d like you to do.....yep, go ahead and google "Short Stories" (don´t worry about poems yet) and see what comes up.

In my own search I found a Wikipedia entry, a bunch of sites put up by teachers, education sites, plus a few good web sites with tons of short stories. I also found free audio versions of many classic short stories.

One of my favorite authors is F. Scott Fitzgerald (we have the same birthday ; ) so I focused on finding stories by him, and have been listening to audio versions of them as well. I did some research into the stories I read/listened to, and found out some cool things about the author and why he wrote them.

I would like you all to do the same kind of thing and keep a record of your progress in your blog. For example:  

• Describe your actions: how are you going to start out researching short stories? If you begin by googling, what sites do you choose to open, which ones caught your eye on the google search page and why? 

• Link to sites you visit, even if you don´t like them, and write some notes about them. Why do they or don´t they work for you?

• What are short stories? Specifically, what defines them in the world of literature? 

• Find a few short stories, either new or classic, and read them. Write down your opinions of them.  

• Try finding and listening to free audio files of any of the short stories you chose, or even new ones. 

• Try finding film, video or tv versions of short stories and do some research on them: has anyone else written about them? If so, do people feel like the written version and the visual version are similar or different?
•  

Remember, this is an advanced level English class, and you are expected to be able to do research on your own. We were going to do this in class today with the laptops, but I know you are all capable of doing this on your own. Recall the video of Sugata Mitra and the kids in India: he gave them a simple task then left them alone. Your simple task is to research the world of short stories and share your research, in detail, with me and the rest of the class via your blogs. 

And, though I hate to have to raise this topic, please DO NOT STEAL OTHER PEOPLE´S WORDS. Copying and pasting from web pages is perfectly fine, and part of this blog project, but YOU MUST IDENTIFY WHERE THE WORDS COME FROM! Put them in quotes and link to the source. It is VERY EASY for me to check to see if people have just stolen other´s text (ritstuld)  so definitely avoid doing that. 

Also avoid copying large chucks of text (say twenty lines of someone else´s words) then only writing a few lines of your own about it. When you do that, you are basically letting someone else think for you, and just agreeing or disagreeing with them. Find the writer´s KEY STATEMENT, the thing that you have an opinion about, and write your OWN WORDS about it. 

You will all need to raise the bar a bit now, put more energy and effort into how much and what you write about and share on your blogs. Like I said before, this is an advanced level college English course, and I need to give you your símat based on a pretty high standard of effort. You have had a few weeks to practice using your blogs, and now I will need to see both increased quantity and content (that means More and Better :D)

I will be checking your blogs tonight to see whether you have put good effort today into starting this research.

We will continue on this theme tomorrow, if my son´s health allows me to make it to work.  

Best of luck,

Maria