One of the main issues since the beginning of the semester was groups. You put all of the students into certain groups. We all created blogs and subscribed to each other. This was a good idea, but not all of the students keep up with their blog so sometimes it would be hard for the students to comment on others blogs because they could not find one. Next semester you could put up a chart on moodle that shows the most frequent bloggers with a link to their blog. This would help the issue of not being able to find others blogs to comment on because they would be able to go to moodle and find out who keeps up with their blog.
As college students we should be responsible and keep up with what is due on certain days. Even though we should remember sometimes we forget if we have to much work or and excessive amount of projects. I am not totally sure if you can do this, but I know one of my other classes sends out reminders via moodle and to our email. So if you can set moddle to send out an email to your student every Tuesday and Thursday saying something like “Hey the blog is due tomorrow, don not forget” this could help the student remember and even increase blog productivity. Honestly this is not a necessity, because we should be responsible and remember on our own, but sometimes we forget due to a lot of work loads.
Not all aspect of the blog are bad though. Giving others ideas and debating over opinions is a good thing in this English class. I liked the fact that we were able to give our own opinion, and not get fully persecuted for it. The best part about the blog is that it replaced the quiz grades. No one enjoys quizzes that much so this replacing the quiz grade was beneficial in my opinion. Most of the blogs that we did were very interesting and intriguing. I especially like the blogs that we used the book for. With most of my classes we don’t even use the books we bought, but the blogs that involved the books felt like I did not waste my money by buying them. Only issue I had with that was that we should have had more blogs dealing with the book. That way we would be using it more for the class.
One thing that should have been implemented more is the stories form the book as blog topics. Those were the more interesting blogs in my opinion. It made me feel that I was actually using the book I paid for. They did have some good stories in the book that could have been used as blog topics. To make the blogs more interesting you could take one of the weeks and have the students choose a story out of the book to write about that week. You would have to make a guideline by which to do the blog post, but it would be a change of pace from the normal blogs.
Other than the few issue I mentioned that could be dealt with depending on your opinion I really did not have any other trouble or problems with the blog. It was a very interesting experience in this English class and I definitely will not forget it. This English 101 class was very enjoyable and hopefully the students in this class next semester will enjoy it just as much.
