Thursday, January 29, 2009

Final Blog

The technologies we have used over this past semester in English 11 have been a nice mix-up to the usual homework. When I am writing a paragraph response to a question online (much like I am now) it doesn’t feel like homework. It feels like something I would be doing after I have finished my homework. It is also nice because I can’t really ever forget something at school. I don’t need to bring all my English stuff home in order to complete the homework because most of the stuff that we are given in class is easily found on the wikipage. Using the internet and sources like wikipages and blogger make writing paragraph responses and doing other homework much more relaxed, but in addition to the normal writing, the technologies we have used in this class have also allowed us to have some fun creating different pages and personalizing them. There wasn’t really a strict way we had to create pages on books and authors, but we had freedom to create them almost however we wanted, even if that includes adding Sail Away by Styx or Tom Sawyer by Rush to a Huck Finn wikipage. The amount of different things you can do with these technologies is almost endless, from adding music and videos to just decorating a page with cool fonts and colors. The room for creativity in creating web pages makes it a lot more fun to do my homework. But beyond being more relaxed and more fun there is almost unlimited resources online, which makes it a lot easier to look things up while in the process of writing a response or creating a wikipage. It also is a lot easier discuss a book with a group of people by simply posting a discussion on a wikipage. With more time than just English class to discuss a book, the discussion can get a lot deeper, which expands the understanding of the book and helps us see the conflicts underneath the obvious plot. In conclusion, I have found this semester of technological pioneering in the field of English 11 learning to be more fun, more efficient, and unexpectedly more educational.

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