Metacognition: The Blogging Experience

Blogging this year in English class was a very unique experience for me and was quite different than how I expected it to be. At the beginning of the year, I wasn't quite sure what we would be blogging about. However, as the year went on, I learned we would be blogging more about specific processes and our thinking in them. This is something that I would like to work better. For chemistry class, we are able to blog about anything we want. I think we could incorporate some more blog prompts that gave the students more freedom about what they want to blog. For example, there is the blog prompt "iMedia" but we never focused on that much. I think there could also be a blog prompt about things we find interesting in the news. This could be called "In Today's News" or something like that. I think I would find blogging more enjoyable if I had more freedom in the topic that I blogged about. We could of course still keep English class related topics, such as "Metacognition" and "Best of the Week", but I would find it enjoyable if some more diverse blogging topics were added and assigned. However, I was surprised that I actually enjoyed some of the prompts that were assigned. I really enjoyed "iMedia" and "Blogging Around". I didn't necessarily enjoy "Metacognition", "Best of the Week/Day", or "What If?", but I think those were all important prompts in terms of helping us reflect on what we had learned or experienced. I am pleasantly surprised with my blogging experience from this past year. I feel as though I have truly reflected on certain things we have discussed in class, specific processes we have gone through, and have made connections from things in class to the outside world. Blogging has given my classmates and me the opportunity to continue a conversation (that started in class) outside the classroom. Another thing that I have liked about this blogging process is how we have been graded. We have not been graded subjectively on our blogs. I feel that this is good because our blogs should be a place where we should feel free to express ourselves and not worry about the grade. If we follow the assigned prompt, then we get full points. This is good because it does not out stress on what we write. We just reflect on the process in any way which we choose. Overall, I would say that the blogging experience in general pleasantly surprised me and was a positive experience.