As the saying goes, ‘there is a
first time for everything’. These words resonated with me personally throughout
the making of my instructional strategies blog.
Although I am familiar with blogs, this would be the first time I would
be called upon to create one for myself. In fact, I found myself at a loss on
how to create one before enrolling in the PIDP 3250 Instructional strategies
class. Initially, it seemed easy enough
to blog through the default Blogger template. However, as the class progressed,
I found meeting course requirements required a lot of modifications that I was
unfamiliar with. Sometimes, it really got out of hand.
In PIDP 3250: Instructional
strategies course, journal entries along with self-assessment and blogging were
used as a reflective exercise to self-evaluate our class projects and thought
processes. The methods of the course were new to me as during my undergraduate
and graduate studies, I was never asked to self-evaluate my work. If I could
sum up the course, I would say it not only introduced us to various teaching
strategies that are being used regularly but also allowed us to think
critically about our own work and abilities.
Some of the classmates’ blogs I
liked were: Susan Doyle’s and Karon Wong’s. Their blogs were easy to navigate
and were reflective of their thought processes. Every entry actually made the
class concepts easier to understand and thus facilitating my understanding of
course. Not to mention they had both
incorporated some interesting side notes and video clips that added an
interesting spin on the topics covered in the discussion forums.
For a person who has just started
their journey in blog making, I think the strength of my blog lays in the fact
that I covered the topics without going off on irrelevant tangents while adding
my personal insights on the writing of the content I had incorporated into my work.
In addition, none of my entires were done “as is,” for every entry I conducted
external research to ensure that my contributions were comprehensive. My blog’s
weakness is likely to be the presentation. Compared to some of my peers, it
comes across as a little amateurish. As the course continued, I did find ways
to enhance the aesthetics, but it certainly did not fit within the time frame
between my visual project, forum contributions, and forum moderation. There
were also a few elements of classroom discussion that I wanted to blog upon in
greater depth but did not have the chance to before the deadline.
Based on the rubric provided for
the purposes of our blog evaluation I would give my blog 95/100, simply because I strongly believe
that my postings reflect not only my learning experience throughout the course,
but they all contain my personal reflection on my learning experiences both in
the past as well as in the present. Furthermore, I had incorporated a
wide-range of media that I thought were very closely tied to the course content
on a weekly basis, regardless I do not still feel that my blog lacks a
professional polish and only incorporates one link to social media instead of
multiple networks. I did consider a Twitter as well, but figured that learning
and updating it would be a little out of my scope. For these reasons, I do not
believe that I deserve a perfect mark on my blog, but given future
opportunities, it is something that I wish to rectify.
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