Hello everyone! Welcome to our own book blog!

Blog is short for weblog. A weblog is a kind of online journal where you can post writing, photos, and even video! There are a lot of blogs about a lot of different things! These days even newspapers have a blog section where professional journalists write about the most current of topics and invite the public to join in conversations about the topics. Some people even make a lot of money with their blogs (usually with the help of advertising)!

Our blog is going to be about the interesting articles and books we read that are part of our extensive reading requirement in class.

The Assignment

The first blog assignment is due on Thursday, January 29. It is worth 1% of your grade in this class as part of Book Blog Posts 1-2 on our class syllabus. 

For the first blog assignment, you will read one article in English that is at least five paragraphs long about a topic you enjoy. 

You can write and post photos and videos about your articles as much as you want, but you must include at least the following information for each article:

1. The title of the article
2. The name of the author
3. A link to the article if the article is online
4. What the article is about and what you learned from the 
    article
5. How the topic/information in the article relates to you
6. Whether or not you like the article and why

It is a good idea to copy this list and paste it into a new blog post to work from because you will not be able to see old posts while you write a new one (or you can just duplicate the screen). That way you are sure to include all required information in your post. 

Before or after you finish your own post, you will also read the articles and posts of the students in your small group and make a comment (of any number of words) about each of them.


How to Find Articles

You can simply type the topic you are interested in an Internet search + the word "articles". Here are two websites are especially useful for English learners because they allow the reader to listen to the article, too:

1. Voice of America (VOA): http://learningenglish.voanews.com/

2. National Public Radio (NPR): www.npr.org

(Note: Not all of NPR's stories have audio with them.)


You can see my own article and blog post as an example above!