Herrington

I picked chapter 5 because now that I am blogging for this class I know how helpful this can be. To get into the practice of writing once a week and to not have the fear of being graded constantly. I really enjoyed the blog "From Love to Social Pressures" in this chapter. I enjoyed the way Herrington describes how a blogging class looks for example helping students who are bored and discouraged. That is what I would want to be the most as a teacher or an instructor- to help the followers/students. Not just order and expect them to fulfill their "duties" To get involved with them would be priority.

According to this chapter, students grow their blogs over the semester and they publish their work. This seems like an interesting idea because that way there is a higher chance that the student improves or increases his expectation level from the blogs he posts.

Encouraging students to post videos, pictures art or anything that they find interesting and exciting is a great way to make their writing more personal or become more attached to these blogs, hence get in the habit of writing more and more.

The most important thing is to get the students accustomed to writing regularly and not see it as something so challenging and boring all the time. And blogging allows the writer to get feedbacks from several other writers and viewers, they almost form a relationship and then the writers feel like they have a "reason" to write better.

Overall if I were to become a teacher someday I would be more than willing to introduce the idea of social networking in the classroom. I know for one , I would be a much better and willing writer if I had such technologically advanced and fun activities in the "classroom."

I thought chapter 3 was extremely interesting too. I guess the word MacBook Pro caught my attention! I am sucker for technology for sure, no surprise there. The collaborative digital writing seemed like division of labor to me in economics, which is basically dividing a task into several tasks and letting a group or an individual focus on a specific task to increase efficiency. Engaging students in “leap frogging” seems like an excellent idea, I myself have experienced this with my other friends in different class projects we did. And usually we started off with a simple idea and as others got more into it we ended up with a complex and interesting idea. Imagine working alone to form a complex idea. I think the author does a very good job with explaining the roles of a teacher starting from encouraging revision to wrapping up. These are the steps that I would write down somewhere to help me in the future. I love what it says in the conclusion that students not only improve their technology skills but also their communication and organizational skills. Seriously the more I am reading these chapters the more I am getting jealous. I wish I had more teachers back home who would take such initiative to get us more involved as opposed always “lecturing” us for two straight hours with most people not even listening to what they were saying. I am really enjoying this book simply because it has so many ideas on how to get students in this generation more excited and interested about writing.