Word up!
31.12.2009
Another year has come and gone. If you’re like me and blog, post Facebook status updates or send an occasional Twitter tweet, much of your daily comings and goings in 2009 appeared online in little bits and pieces.
So what happens when Facebook comes out with the “My year in status” application? As Time magazine writer Claire Suddath found out, you realize just how uneventful your life is, even if you are a cool Facebook user.
As a blogger, I’m taking the “year in status” application
one step further. Using the wonderful online tool, Wordle, I’ve created a blog
cloud for 2009. The more frequent the words, the bigger they appear in the
cloud. My boss will probably like the fact that “business” and “students” are
my most frequently blogged words. This is a good thing for a business English
teaching blog. If they had been “shopping” and “golf”, I might need to consider
finding a new line of work.
Wordle: Meg Englemann's 2009 blogs
Wordle, by the way, is a great application for students. With just a bit of copying and pasting, they can make their own customized word clouds from notebook entries, articles, essays or vocabulary lists.
Another great way to ring out 2009 and ring in the New Year is with Jibjab’s 2009 Year in Review animated film.
There are also, albeit some below the belt, office certificates, ready for your students to personalize and distribute in 2010.Cheers and Happy New Year!
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COMMENTS
Dear Meg,
I really enjoyed reading your blogs and "Apply yourself" encouraged me to write to you. This article reminded me of a time exactly 20 years ago when I had to learn to apply to a job. I was 40 years old, had been working as a teacher for 18 years and left the GDR in 1989. As a so called refugee I lived in Bavaria and was desperately looking for a job as a teacher of Russian and English. I wrote about 60 applications... Bavaria didn't give me a chance. There was no positive answer in my letterbox.
Now looking back I'm happy about it because I made the decision to go home to Thuringia in 1990. I wrote one application, passed an assessment (everybody called it AC and nobody knew what it really meant) and was lucky to get an interesting job for the next 18 years.
I'd like to thank you for your your interesting articles, they always inspired me to add this or that to my lessons.
I wish you a good time during your post-graduate program,interesting topics, success and nice people around you.
Best regards,
Giesela