KMcD Who decides what is published on the site?
information on the play. If you’re studying Elizabeth Bishop, have a look at McSweeney’s Sestinas, and encourage your pupils to produce their own work in that extraordinary form. Arts and Letters Daily is one of the best things on the Web – brainfood for jaded teachers! The Shakespeare Search Engine, Clusty, can offer you lots of interesting ways to approach the plays, and can be used by pupils learning quotations and hunting for ideas. English teachers should have a look at the late Andrew Moore’s site, The Universal Teacher (written from a UK perspective, but full of good things for teachers here too). And Poetry 180 – a poem a day for the school year put together by the American poet Billy Collins. There are also some links to sites on language, such as Professor Terry Dolan’s Hiberno-English site.
JG We take in pupils’ work via email, which allows us to exercise quality control. They can’t post directly themselves, but you can easily set up a blog which allows all the teachers in a department to post directly. KMcD How do you think the site will develop in the future? JG Who knows? We couldn’t have guessed even five years ago that we could have done something like this so easily (and at no cost!). We’re still discovering how it can be used, as the school year progresses. For instance, we held a poster competition in the school for our Shakespeare Society production of Twelfth Night in November, and we wanted the artists to be inspired by the work of the great early French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue. So we then realised we could put an ‘album’ of his pictures on Yahoo Photos, and add a link from the blog. Then when the winner was announced, we put her poster on the site. Links to other applications can be very powerful tools. So, for instance, instead of putting a long story on the main page, you can link to an online word processor such as Writely or ZohoWriter.
They’re not all ferociously intellectual or serious. The Onion is consistently full of brilliant and funny writing. Have a look at the Automatic Shakespeare Insulter Machine, or the Broken Poem Generator, or the Home for Abused Apostrophes. KMcD What are the technicalities involved in setting up a blog? JG Recent Web developments have made it extraordinarily easy. We use the most common service, www.blogger.com (owned by Google), but there are others too. You need very little technical expertise – in fact, anyone reasonably familiar with the internet will be able to set up a site within five minutes (I promise). Just choose a password, username and title for your site and there it is. If you want to dress it up a little more, then it’s easy enough to learn – I did.
We have various ‘categories’ on the site, and one I particularly want to develop is Creative Writing – so that the site becomes an archive of excellent poetry, short stories and so on. We hope before long to have more work from the youngest pupils in the school. Last year the poet Louise Callaghan took some poetry workshops with them, and in future we’ll be able to publicise the work produced by such events.
If any readers want to ask me questions, there’s an email link on our site, so feel free to get in touch. Finally, I’d like to say that though it’s been interesting and enjoyable to set up this blog, and that the Web now provides us with exciting opportunities, for me, everything comes back to books … we want our pupils to read and write, and to love literature, and our site is one more tool to help them do that.
KMcD Can you recommend some good websites? JG The Links section (on the right-hand sidebar) is a list of websites we think are useful, interesting, amusing … Recently we’ve been studying The Crucible, and it’s handy to direct our pupils via our own blog to a couple of excellent sites which gather
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