My Third Quarter Reflection

Jennifer Tabasco 11-2
English III
Mr. Fiorini
March 30, 2009

My Own “Blogging” Experience

1. Has blogging been valuable to you as a student, thinker, reader, and writer?
Yes, I do believe that blogging has been valuable to me as a student, thinker, reader, and a writer. As a student, I think that blogging is another writing technique that students can use to compose their writings, and it’s also a writing system where students can freely express their personal opinions and beliefs. I enjoy the blogging web because I can have the ability to say whatever is on my mind in relation to certain scenarios. Blogging is like an outlet for me to say whatever comes to my mind first, and I really admire having that ability to do that for an English class. As a thinker, I can read many of my classmate’s other blogs, and I can think about their own personal statements. Sometimes, when I read my classmate’s blogs, there are ideas that I come across where I haven’t even thought of, and their thoughts allow me to think in a different mindset, I their mindset. As a reader, I also can have the ability to read my classmate’s blogs, and their blogs strengthen my reading skills because there are so many different writing styles that people use depending on the writer. I enjoy reading when it’s not boring or too long; the reading has to make complete sense, and it has to have some supporting detail behind it to make the reading interesting. Finally, as a writer, many creative ideas are constantly being formulated through the blogging, and my writing has also become strengthened through this writing technique. If I want to make any immediate changes to my writing, I can just go on the blogging website, and I can fix the errors that need correcting. I’ve also become a lot stronger with expressing my opinions because I support my opinions with a lot of detail for readers to fully understand what it is that I’m trying to say.

2. How do you feel about doing and continuing to do this kind of work?
In my perspective, I enjoy doing this type of writing skill. Usually, for any English class, you would have to physically hand in papers, and then you would have peer editing in the classroom. But, as for this English class, everything that’s written is in electronic form, so you don’t have to worry about anything being lost on certain occasions. If someone forgot to save their writing, well that’s a whole other different story. The peer editing comes through the comments that other people make about each other’s writing, and I think that this commenting technique is so much more helpful than actually editing paper’s freehand because the writer receives feedback from readers who can actually make suggestions to improve the writer’s paper. I would really like to continue doing this type of work because why would you want to print out papers every week when you can just post it on your blog? Money, time, and the printer’s ink are all being recycled and saved here just by posting it on the blog each week. I really hope that for the rest of this year and for senior year, we will continue to do this type of writing work because blogging makes everyone’s lives a whole lot easier just by posting their writings online.

3. Is this work different from other experiences that you have had in English classes?
Yes, absolutely, this work is different from other experiences that I have had in English classes. For both ninth and tenth grade classes, we would have to do peer editing along with typing and printing out our papers for Mrs. Triolo to read and grade. Right now, I’m taking an English Composition 101 College Course for Community College of Philadelphia on Mondays and Wednesdays, and our teacher also makes up print out and hand in our papers for grading. For this English class, we don’t even need to worry and stress out on all of that. All we have to do is just check the blog each night to keep up with the work that we might have missed or have not done yet, and then once our work is completed, we can post it to our own blogs. I love having the ability to go online and checking our blogs because it reassures me that I have all of my work complete and posted instead of going into class the next day and wasting a whole entire period on peer editing each other’s papers. This writing technique also makes the weeks go by pretty quickly because once the writing for this week closes, then the writing for the next week begins on a whole new topic. In addition to this writing work, I think that writing on our blogs allows us as writers to become more proficient with what we write because writing should be about expressing one’s inner most thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Writing can be about anything that we can say, and our opinions should matter when we write them in our papers for grading.

4. What suggestions do you have for me as a teacher who uses blogging in his English classes?
Well, I don’t think that I really have any suggestions for you on the blogging situation, Mr. Fiorini. Just one thing, this is just my personal opinion: I think that for each upcoming week, you should have a little post about what’s happening for this week’s class so all of your students can read and be prepared for the following class. As a student, this schedule technique helps me a lot because I love knowing ahead of time what’s exactly going to happen for the upcoming week’s class. Maybe that would be too much for you to do since I know that you have grading and other priorities in your life, but that was just one of my suggestions that I was recommending for you. In addition to that one suggestion, at the beginning of the year, I enjoyed how you gave a tutorial lesson on how to use the Google Groups, but since you switched over to Blogger, maybe for the incoming new Juniors, you should give a tutorial lesson for them on how to use Blogger. Through all of your major posts, you seem to really love what you write, and it seems to me that you know exactly what you want to say for any of your posts. The pictures on certain blogs also make the posts come to life so there’s a sense of imagery through those blogs. Other than that, your teaching on blogging is doing extremely well, and I hope that you can continue through with it for the next year.

5. Looking forward, do you have suggestions for how you want to be graded on this writing?
Looking forward, I think that our writings should be graded on if it everything makes sense and if there’s enough clarity in the writing. I mean, if there’s just a bunch of words with not enough supporting detail on a post, then you should question the writer on what exactly they were trying to say based on that post. I’m always worried about if my posts are too long sometimes, so I don’t think that maximum or minimum length should even matter while grading the posts. As for the grammar, punctuation, and spelling, that obviously has something to do with it since this is an English class, and I know that some English teachers (not you) are very strict when it comes to hardcore English editing. I don’t think that everything should be based on all of that English stuff; the grading should all be about if it makes enough sense and if the writing is clear enough to make perfect sense. Opinions are for everyone to have, and no one should be entirely graded on their opinion either. I mean, the opinion has to make some logical sense, but there shouldn’t be a right or wrong answer when it comes to stating opinions on certain situations. In addition to this, I believe that the grading system that you have now is fine with me, but as for some other people, they might have some suggestions that might make it better for them or for the whole entire class.