Reflections on the Blog

1. Has blogging been valuable to you as a student, thinker, reader, and writer?
Yes, blogging has been valuable to me as a student, thinker, and writer, though not so much a reader. As a student I was able to read fellow student's ideas to see where my ideas were in relation to their own ideas. This also helped me as a thinker, because if someone had different ideas than I did then I could read their post and see their ideas on the matter at hand, and gain some other insight that I otherwise would not have had. I'm not quite sure how writing on the blog helps me as a writer. I guess it helps me to write essays with my own personal style instead of the mechanical way that essays seemed to write themselves out before.

2. How do you feel about doing and continuing to do this kind of work?
I think that doing and continuing to do this kind of work, writing blogs and responding to other student's blogs is fun. It allows for a better interaction where there normally wouldn't be one, since we have separate classes at different times every day. It allows us to see what everyone is saying about the same topic. Even though it's about the same topic, everyone's answers are all different, because each person has different, possibly similar, ideas for every prompt we are given to write about, since even our free-write prompts have a prompt that just isn't stated as such.

3. Is this work different from other experiences that you have had in English classes?
Yes this work is different than other experiences I've had in English classes before. Before I would hardly ever be able to read anyone's writing, unless I was proofreading a friend's paper for them. Now I have the whole blog at me fingertips to see what other students are saying about our writing and we can actually get some feedback from the same, or possibly different, students.

4. Looking forward, do you have suggestions for how you want to be graded on this writing?
Well the grading system is confusing. I don't understand what I'm being graded on or what I did wrong. I can't improve my writing without strong constructive criticism. I'm very serious about my writing and I always try my best, but I'm not great with writing the right way or the mechanicals of writing. I can write very basically and spice it up later, but I don't know how I'd be able to fix my writing if I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Sure, Mr. Fiorini comments too, but the comments don't go into the specific details of what I have to fix and how I should fix it, which is what I need to help improve my writing.

5. Has doing this work changed the community within your own class or between classes (11-1 and 11-2) in any way?
I think doing the blog work has changed the community within the classes because before this we really didn't know how the other class wrote or their ideas, unless we felt like going through all the posts back on the Google forum. Now we can find the person's whose blog we want to read and read their blog. It's easy to read what they're writing and their ideas on the same questions we're asked.