1. In your opinion, what was the purpose of this blogging activity? (Why did I choose to do blogging instead of more traditional writing activities?)
Before this activity, I had heard of blogging, but never even considered starting a blog. At the beginning of the school year when I found out we were going to be writing blogs, I guess I was excited. At the same time though, I was a little confused. For a while, I was wondering about why we would be doing a blog and what we could learn from this. Well, thankfully, I have since found out! You have always said that we blog so that we can express our feelings about a certain topic. Through blogging about a passion of ours, we are able to improve our writing. I think something that really helped us improve our writing as well was learning about the different sentence types. Having to incorporate specific writing techniques in our blogs helped to improve our writing and I think we will only get better as time goes on, especially if people continue to blog after the end of school. At times, I thought writing wiki’s were a little easier, just because we knew what we had to write about, and I would sometimes have difficulty coming up with ideas about what to write about for my blog. Once I got a topic to write about, and I was into my writing, it was a lot easier than writing a wiki. In this regard, I do believe that our writing has improved because we were able to write about our own ideas, and I think most of us were more willing and/or excited to write our blogs. Also because we were writing about topics that we chose, I seemed to branch out a little more within in my topic. This was interesting for me, and I was really able to learn a lot more things about swimming that I would’ve never researched about otherwise.
2. What have you accomplished during your blogging?
During my blogging experience, I have accomplished a lot more than I had anticipated at the beginning. I feel that my writing has improved, but not drastically. I don’t know weather this is due to only have written a few blogs, or what but at least I feel that there was an improvement. Through blogging, I believe that I became a stronger writer, a lot due to the fact that we learned the sentence types. Of course, I had heard of the four sentence types, but I have never really focused on them in my writing. At the beginning of that lesson, quite frankly, I was confused about everything. I didn’t quite get all the stuff about main and subordinate clauses and was really worried when I found out they had to be used in our blogs. After a couple more classes and a little more research about the topic, I started to get it. What really helped me I think though is being forced to use them in my blogs. If it was just an optional thing or just an idea, I probably wouldn’t take the time to focus on that, and I wouldn’t have learned anything. Also, at the beginning of our whole blog experience, I was a little unsure about having to write about our own topic. Of course, swimming popped into my head immediately, but I had no idea what I was going to write about for a few blogs. I got my five blogs in and found a topic I was interested in for every one of them. The thing is, the topics I wrote about weren’t topics that I think I usually would’ve picked. So, through this process, I think I have somehow expanded my interests within swimming, which is a really cool thing. I also accomplished this new sort of ‘enjoyment’ of writing. I never really have enjoyed writing throughout my school life. In all honestly, I have always enjoyed writing like wiki’s easier and more enjoyable because I know I’m searching for an answer to a question, and when I get there, I feel a sense of accomplishment. Doing these blogs though, really got me to enjoy writing about whatever I wanted. Even though it was hard to pick topics to writer about, once I started writing, it was easy and I really seemed to enjoy it. Honestly, I don’t know what I didn’t like about it before!
3. What key concepts have you learned while blogging? (This can be about writing, research or technology etc.)
While blogging, I defiantly learned a lot more than I every thought I would. What was most exciting for me when writing these blogs was researching. I would never on my own time go and research the author of “Swimming to Antarctica” or about Dara Torres. I know who they are and thought they were pretty cool, but I would not go and really find out more about them. Reading about these people and topics was really exciting and interesting for me, and I believe it gave me more inspiration. I was able to learn so much more about my passion and get different insights about different things. I also learned how to set up a blog and really get to work with it. I never had a blog before so didn’t know a lot about it, but I was able to catch on quickly. I enjoyed experimenting around with my blog, and I believed I learned a lot more about my blog this way. I learned how to attach photos, movies, and links; although I know I still have loads more to learn. Something that I learned that was surprising to me was that I seemed to find better websites to research from. I don’t know if this was just a coincidence or if I didn’t mind reading other’s blogs. Before blogging myself, I would never read a blog if it came up under my results, but now I know that many blogs can be reliable and are sometimes very helpful. This helped me and will continue to help me with future writing activities. Of course, I learned more in depth about the four sentence types and was glad to be able to use them in my blogs, and hopefully be able to use them in my writing in the future. I believe by learning these sentence types makes my writing more interesting, more flowing, and more sophisticated.
4. Based on the skills you learned while blogging, how will this benefit you in the future? This maybe inside or outside of school.
The things I learned in my blogging experience can defiantly be used in other areas of my life. For example, my research I believe can improve because I now know that many blogs are reliable (given the fact that their sources are sited). This means that I will have a wider range of resources to get information from and maybe more information. This skill will be able to help me in all classes in the future and in upcoming research papers. Of course, learning about the four sentence types and having to use them in our blogs was a great learning experience that I can carry on into my future. Something else that I can use later on is being able to write freely about topics. While writing my blogs, I was forced to do research and most of the time, I had a hard time of thinking what to write about. It somehow got easier as I wrote more blogs. I now know that you can pick one some topic or person, and get a lot of information from it, and really make an interesting blog from it. Knowing this, I am now more confident in myself and my writing, knowing that people may find my blogs interesting.
