Reflection #4: Keeping up with a blog

Keeping up with a blog is not as easy as you may think. When you're not used to having a blog and managing it on a frequent basis you end up forgetting you even have one. It happened to me. I'm not used to taking online classes, let alone be in charge of a blog that you have to update weekly to meet the course requirements.

The class is still focusing on adorning our blogs and filling them with information that relates to our areas of study so we haven't done anything different. However, we did learn the basics of Microsoft Word and that was a great class! Apparently, we've all been living under rocks (or at least I have), because Word has a lot of features that i didn't know existed, which are there to make your life easier and to facilitate your work while writing on this platform. Like the citation feature... WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?! I've been using online citation generators since I started doing essays and all this time there was that little button on the toolbar that I simply didn't care to notice and would have saved me a lot of copy-pasting time all these years.

Anyway, I really want to thank the professor, foe taking the time to enlighten us with these mind blowing tricks Word has to offer and for helping us to have a better writing experience overall.

Here is the work done in class this week.

Reflection #3: Getting to know your blog

This week we concentrated on getting to know our blogs and adding stuff to it so it looks pretty and has nice content on it. I gotta say, I love blogging. It is very exciting and fun. I've thought about having a personal blog before, but I did not have the necessary tools to make my idea possible. I'm hoping after this class I'll be able to make it happen.

In class, we talked about html code and embed code. How to use them and what they are for. We added pages, links, animations and many other things to our blogs. I'm getting the hang of this whole blogging trend and I definitely see how it would be a magnificent tool in the classroom. Students can have access to a class blog which would have all kinds of information related to the class, organized by date or topic, making it easier and more entertaining to learn.

I will be using this tool in the future in my classrooms and also in my personal life. That's it for right now...

Here is the work we have been doing on the class' Website this week.

Embed document example

Reflection #2: Creating a Blog

On this second week, we had to make gmail accounts to be able to create our blogs. We couldn't use the @upr.edu account provided to us by the university to create the blog, therefore, those who didn't already have a separate gmail account, had to create a new one.

I was surprised that many people didn't have separate gmail accounts from the university, I guess not everybody has realized that hotmail is long dead... which in turn, reminded the professor of a funny video about unconventional email addresses. Back when it wasn't cool to use your name as an email address, some people (myself included) would have a very awkward sounding, usually embarrassing combination of words for an email and you had to think twice about who you gave it to.

After we were done laughing about the video, we finally created this blog but we couldn't really get much done because of the time but we did get to write a nifty introduction (which is the first post on this blog) summarizing our purpose for the blog and what the class is about and also, our first weekly reflection. That's it for this week folks.

Link example

Uncle Tom's Cabin

12 Years a Slave

Narratives of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Video example

Branches of Linguistics

Branches of linguistics from Victory30