Author: authenticlearning

I’m a high school teacher who is teaching an ELL Composition and Writing class. I was told about the Student Blogging Challenge by my principal. One of the big things in my classes is I want the learning experience to be as authentic as possible. I want students to feel like they’re doing something that’s useful, rather than just another assignment that’s required for a grade. I hoped that having a broader audience for their work would encourage them to put their heart into writing as I do.

Highlights: The topics for the student blogging challenge were very well chosen. They were quite broad for my application. Giving my students too many choices confuses them. But I could always find one or two topics that were intriguing. I would then present the one or two choices to my students, rather than the whole blog post. I particularly liked when we described our country. We made slideshow videos and the students recorded narration for them. Since most of the audience has never been to Taiwan, I thought they would find it interesting. The holidays also produced interesting posts, as Chinese cultural holidays are very different from western ones. We ended up writing Limericks for one, but I can’t remember if that was even part of the challenge. One of our students got a huge number of comments about his because it was featured. I really appreciate Kathleen featuring several of our posts, because it really attracted a lot more traffic and interest.

Comments and Interactions: I appreciate the effort at the start to teach the students to make good comments. As I mentioned, we got a bunch of hilarious comments about the limericks. Those were genuine. I did feel like a lot of the commenters were directed to do so by their teachers and didn’t really care about the blog. They would always post a link to their blog. I visited many of them, but I felt like it was just a plan to get more traffic. Most of those blogs were not of a high quality either.

Suggestions: I know that a lot of planning and work goes into this process. Kathleen and whoever else was involved did an excellent job keeping things organized.

I like the concept of class blogs, but I had a bit of trouble with those features on the website. The students who made their own blogs, were never properly added into my class. Other students were posting directly to my class blog, which is fine. I ended up linking in half the class and the other half were on my blog. I understand that Word Press is a well-respected platform, but I don’t really like the interface. I use it for my school’s website, and I don’t find it intuitive, even though I do a lot of tech stuff. Next time, I’ll use Google’s Blogger because it’s much easier to navigate and use. I spent a huge amount of time at the start of the semester teaching students to use the platform.

My other suggestion is for other teachers. It seemed like they didn’t really know how to help the students produce a quality blog. I understand that a lot of teachers have so many students in their classes that they can’t give constructive criticism and help, but a lot of the blogs I looked at were clearly done as an assignment and didn’t seem ready for a broader audience. I do understand the challenges teachers face, though, with time and resources.

Conclusion: Thank you to Kathleen and all the others who went out of their way to make this experience one of learning and fun. I think it’s a great idea and I’ll be doing it in the future if I’m teaching a class in this area of study. I believe that this is the direction we need to go in education, authentic learning opportunities with real-world skills and application.

I made a short video about the natural beauty of Taiwan. Enjoy!

I lived in Korea for 2.5 years. One thing I realized very quickly is that Chuseok is their biggest holiday. Everyone talks about it for a while before it starts. When you ask what it is, they’ll tell you that it’s “Korean Thanksgiving”. This actually is a good description for a couple of reasons which I will explain.

First, one Chuseok tradition is the family dinner, much like western Thanksgiving celebrations. Obviously, the food is very different but equally important.

Just like most crowded East Asian countries, holiday traffic is totally insane. I remember riding on a bus stuck in traffic at 2 am in the morning. 2 AM!!! How can so many people be on the road in the middle of the night?

(I took all the photos that aren’t marked as coming from Photosforclass.com)

When I was younger, I listened to a lot of rock and metal. In high school, I listened to Linkin Park, Static-X, Disturbed, Smashing Pumpkins, 3 Doors Down, and Green Day. In college, my tastes softened and broadened and I listened to some punk rock like Panic at the Disco and Yellowcard, trances like Above and Beyond and Armin Van Buren, and different random music like Matisyahu. As I got older, I almost completely stopped listening to music and mostly just listen to podcasts now. I think the draw of music is strongest from 14 years old up to early 20s and then it becomes less important in your life, unless you play an instrument. Most of the adults I know only can talk about music from when they were teenagers.

What music do you like? Take my survey.

Music Poll

There once was a Pontiac

That drove with rattle and clap

Headlights so dim

You couldn’t see Jim

It ended on its roof in a snap

There once was a woman named Bell

She had a nice hat to sell

The hat was so big

It covered her wig

And she fell off a carousel

The internet is full of bad commenting, especially on places like Twitter and Facebook. Here are my tips to quality comments.

• No personal attacks: I see lots of commenters attacking someone calling them “libtards” “snowflakes” “white supremacists” and other pejoratives. It doesn’t do any good and only makes people angry.
• Check your posts: I’m guilty of posting quickly without proofreading just like everyone. Even though I don’t use Twitter, I know that you can’t edit posts. Donald Trump gets criticized for posting without proofreading, but many of us do it, too. Facebook does allow edits, which is nice and I take advantage of it to fix errors.
• Thoughtful questions: Think of questions that are well thought out and will cause people to think about the topic from multiple angles.
• Compliments: I notice that Instagram is full of positivity and compliments, much more so than the other platforms. People like positive affirmation and it helps them to improve in the future to know what has been done well. Don’t lie and flatter the poster, though. It doesn’t help.
• Keep it short: I get really annoyed when people post long comments without thinking through a concise way to say things. Facebook is bad about this because there are no limits to length. I think that is why Twitter limits to 280 characters. It increases the quality of comments because people can’t ramble on. On Instagram, the format means that people don’t feel the need to ramble.

I downloaded an app called Bitmoji and took a selfie. It magically created a cartoon character that looked like me. Now I can express myself with cool emojis which look like me. Another cool feature is that it syncs with my Gboard on my phone and I can easily add these emojis into any conversation. I’m not sure how often I’ll use it yet.

I like volleyball, so this one fits me.