Eight years I plugged away at chronicling, filtering, modelling, showcasing, recycling, reflecting, and reviewing in posts for students on the Writing Studio Blog (WSBlog). During that time, I learned a lot about blogging with students, and there have been several satisfying advances in Blogger blog affordances as well, for example the advent of pages, and the threading of comments on posts.
Blogger renamed widgets gadgets, and baked many new ones in, which made them easy for casual bloggers such as English-as-an-additional-language learners to use. The link roll on the WSBlog has grown to almost a page in length, and the label cloud, to almost a page and a half (actual size). Embeddable external-source gadgetry like Cluster Maps and Flag Counter indicate[s] that the WSBlog had over 7,000 (perhaps not unique) visitors in the four years up till November 2014, and that there have been well over 18,000 page views since August 2010.
Though I'm relatively certain that those aren't the largest numbers in the blogosphere, they're large enough to reflect on with a certain degree of satisfaction. Regrettably, however, RSS services that colleagues and I had adopted to concatenate feeds of independent learner blog entries for inclusion in our teaching blogs went the way many free or inexpensive services do, and workarounds never quite made it back to the stage of single feeds to display posts from multiple blogs in now standard RSS gadgets–so much to do, and so little time to do it.
Before I put the WSBlog into suspended animation (from which it might snore itself awake from time to time), I'd like to do one more little bit of showcasing–this time not for students in successive cohorts, but rather for those in classes which finished meeting last month. They sat exams on January 28, 2015.
To wrap things up for now, I'd like to point out to class members and their near-peers a few of the best bibliographies–modified APA-style lists of books that individual students reviewed, and the most reflective portfolios (PFs) in pages that students added or linked to their blogs.
- Students, please remember that if you aren't logged in to your university accounts, Google documents and spreadsheets stored on the university site will be invisible.
- Please also note that for the PFs themselves, the writing before, between and after the iframes was more important than the activities and progress represented within the iframes.
Without further adieu, ...
Best biblio's (book listings):
- Takahiro's,
- Nana's, and
- Rina's (includes a good first go at a movie listing, too); and
Best PFs:
- Misaki's
- Miri's and Nana's (tie), and
- Kazuyo's.
Many thanks to all!
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