Year in Review

As the year draws to a close, there are more and more year-in-review videos, slideshows and stories available.
Start by watching this video and see how the World Searched with Google's 2010 Zeitgeist:

This year-in-review infographic from http://jess3.com/year-in-review-infographic-2010/  is great to visualise "2010’s biggest stories, broken down into 4 categories: Inspiring Acts, Natural Disasters, Good Sports, Financial Uprisings, and Survivor Stories".
On December 26, BBC also published an interesting audio slideshow: WE REMEMBER...IN 2010 recalling the people who passed away this year including "the deaths of sporting legends, Hollywood stars and political heavyweights". It takes around 8 minutes but it's worth watching and listening here.
The Guardian's year in review is really good: it allows us to see how the year unfolded month-by-month and even day-by-day but even better is the fact that teachers can build their own year in review or, obviously, ask students to do it. As they put it "add a story per month to create a personalised interactive to share with others." Try clicking on "Add story to your 2010" above the pictures and you'll have a calendar with the 12 months. Then, on your right, there are arrows you can click on to search for your story for each month. Easy, right? This way, we / sts can choose the month story we / they consider most relevant, present it to class and explain why.
As usual, such materials don't contain much information - usually topics - but are great for end of year quizzes, for news reviews, to refresh our memories thus providing food for thought... for discussion and research.

Bearing this in mind, let me tell you what I did in class last week as a way of "year in review".

I have an amazing class of false beginners and was reviewing Past Simple (to be, regular and irregular verbs)

when Time Magazine published their 2010 "Person of the Year" - Mark Elliot Zuckerberg,  the founder of the famous social network FACEBOOK awarded "for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives".             

 
After collecting some info and images I came up with a worksheet which included the cover of Time Magazine some biodata in topic form, and real pictures of the young billionaire as a child. As I didn't have much time I even provided them with his BIOGRAPHY based on those topics but we could /should certainly have done it in class together also using the infos collected orally when eliciting information about the picture. As a follow-up activity, sts can build groups with the other Runners-Up , do some research on them and present what they have in class in order to boost a debate each defending their runner-up for the award (or just ask them to write a biography!); sts can also choose a person from a previous year (1927-2009) or simply choose someone they admire and, based on the topics suggested (to prevent simple copy and paste), write his / her biography.

Myself - PERSON OF THE YEAR!
(don't know which, though :))

Well, Time Magazine and Facebook also give us a unique
opportunity to picture ourselves "Person of the Year", by creating and sharing our own cover on Facebook!!! Click here! I guess sts would love doing something like this :))))

If this topic interests you, don't miss the movie "The Social Network" recently released. I really enjoyed it but got a strange feeling of Mark Zuckerberg and kept thinking about a book I read called "The Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time" by Mark Haddon whose main character had Asperger's Syndrome and lived in his own world...
wikipedia.org also has loads of infos both on Mark Zuckerberg, on previous editions of "Person of the Year" and the history behind it.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037109_2037122,00.html - a video with the History of Social Networking; looking at everything from cavemen to the ancient nerds of yore to Facebook, Odd Todd takes you on a journey through the history of social networking.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037109_2037113,00.html - a one minute Video on Facebook.