Reflection

Semester Reflection

Over the years in school I always had a hard time in English. I enjoy reading and writing, but always had a hard time with writing essays and comprehending on what I was reading. When I first entered the class I thought that I was going to be relearning the writing and reading techniques that I already learned in the previous years, but to my surprise I learned new helpful ways to write a great paper. The new ideas, tools, and lessons really changed how I thought about reading and writing.

One of the examples on the helpful lessons that I learned in this course was when we was taught about Memoirs and how to write a descriptive paper. Not only did we get to choice our own personal experience to write about, we also got to put together our own personal digital story that went along with it. We also had many student samples that gave us tips and ideas that really helped out on writing our papers. Learning about this improve my writing because it in- lighted my knowledge on writing stories. The digital story helped me in using descriptive words which helped me in transferring those words in my papers.

We learned about many useful tools that can help us with reading and writing. The most helpful tool that was introduced to me was Diigo.com. I never heard of this tool before so I was excited about it, a couple of days on playing around and using Diigo.com it immediately became an everyday use. The tools on Diigo.com help me in reading and taking notes on articles on line. Also with the bookmark tool it helped me to go back to that page and kept my highlighted notes on that page. This tool made it much easier for me to read articles or any other information online.

The area that I still feel like I’m weak in is writing a good introduction paragraph. I still feel like this is a huge challenge for me in writing essays. Even though I did learn a lot about using different techniques on writing an introduction, I still had a hard time applying my knowledge into my essays. The use of technology really impacted my knowledge in learning because I could work on my papers inside class and have my professor’s help. With the use of the computers I was able to look up research in class that helped me with most of my papers. An example of how technology impacted my knowledge in this course is the use of Blogging. Blogging was a great idea for me because it allowed me to upload my draft to my blog and let my peers comment and give me great ideas on how I can improve my paper. Overall I enjoyed learning about the new techniques that helped me with my reading and writing abilities.