Blog 11: Student Learning Outcomes

When I first saw that I was going to create a blog and write posts throughout the semester, I got a little nervous. I knew nothing about blogging. Even though I would read some occasionally, I had no idea how the authors went about setting theirs up and deciding what they should be writing about. I always thought of writing in college as formal papers that had to be sophisticated and filled of academic language. By having this assignment to create a bog and write these posts, I was able to practice writing in a different way. It took me some time but I finally realized that in order to write these blog posts, I had to change how I write.

Each week there would be a different prompt for me to respond to that went along with what we were learning about in class. These blog posts helped me to think critically about the concepts and reflect we were talking about. I was able to take the ideas that Tompkins and Hicks were talking about and connected it with experiences in my own life. I was able to take away the big ideas from the books as well as our class and think about how I would implement them in my future classroom. During one session, we talked about how to incorporate writer’s workshop in our classroom. When I got home, I was able to think about all the ideas that we talked about and write a post talking about which ones I would use in my classroom. I now can use this blog as a reference for when I am ready to implement these ideas in a classroom of my own.

Students blogging in the classroom

When looking out the learning outcomes of this class (LTED 618), I can see how I was able to meet them by keeping up with a blog each week. By writing a blog post each week, I grew as a reader and a writer.   These blog posts helped to show me the relationship between the writing and the reading process. I will admit that I originally thought that the reading process and the writing process were two different processes that never mixed. By learning more about each process and actually working through the process, I can see how they work together and can be mixed. Tompkins adds “Linking reading, writing, and thinking improves students’ literacy learning and their content area learning” (Tompkins, 2019, pg. 119). These blog posts let me connect what I was reading with what I wanted to write.  As I was writing my blog post each week, I would look for outside articles that I could hyper-link into my post. I would in the middle of the writing process but have to stop to switch to the reading process as I wanted to include research that backed what I was writing about.

Another outcome that this blog has really helped me to understand, is knowing how readers and writers can use different genres to communicate. Throughout the semester we spent time learning about the different genres people can write in. After learning about the genres, I realized that I do most of my writing within the narrative genre. I would say that most of my blog posts would fall under the narrative genre as well however there were a few posts that I did write that were in form of a letter and would be in the letter genre. I learned a lot about how writers try to communicate with their reader. A persons blog site might be set up in a certain way depending on the topic that they are taking about and how they want to communicate with their reader.

Going along with different genres and communication, another outcome that the blogs really helped me to understand better is the role of purpose and audience in writing. In order to write these blog posts, I had to switch the way that I normally write. Tompkins always talked about how you always start with thinking about what the purpose of the piece is and who the audience is before deciding what genre it will be. Blogs are more personal since the writer is trying to connect with their audience. When you write a blog, you have to write it in a way that you are having a conversation with you readers. They have to be engaged with the topic and excited to read every word. While looking at the “habits of mind”, I realized that I had to change my writing so that it was more open and creative. I needed to learn how to write in a way that it felt like I was having a conversation with anybody that was reading it. This was a hard thing for me to do since I wasn’t used to it.

Writing these blog posts truly allowed me to make sure that I was reading with importance but that I am also writing with expression. It allowed me to experiment with all the digital features that can be added to text to help make it ‘digitally enhanced’ (Hicks, 2013) since we are now living in a digital world.

Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of  Teachers of English, & National Writing Project. (2011).  Framework for success in postsecondary writing.  Retrieved from http://wpacouncil.org/framework/

HelpTeaching.com. (2015, November 10). 5 Benefits of blogging in the ela classroom. [blog] Retrieved from http://blog.whoosreading.org/5-benefits-of-blogging-in-the-ela-classroom

Hicks, T. (2013).  Crafting digital writing.  Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann.

  

Tompkins, G. E.  (2019). Teaching writing:  Balancing process and product (7^th ed.).  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Merrill.

Blog 11:Student Learning Outcomes