Learning Log Entry 12

Last Entry...

For our very last entry, we must compare our leanrings as a result of this blog to the Course Objectives:

Students will gain knowledge and competency with regards to:
1. the variety of genres that readers and writers use to communicate
2. the role of purpose and audience in writing and reading and the rhetorical voices used to address the desired purposes and audiences
3. the historical and comtemporary theoretical models of reading and writing, including new literacy theories of reading and writing
4. the relationship between the reading and writing process
5. the role of metacognition in writing proficiency and reading comprehension
6. the types of reading and writing assignments that are developmentally appropriate for learners, including digital reading and writing assignments
7. the role of writing assessment and evaluation in determinging student writing proficieny and reading comprehension


Through this blog, I feel that I accomplished objective 5 explicitly in writing posts for this blog.  While writing, I was forced to think through my thoughts and reflect on my assumptions and new learnings.  This made me develop my metacognitive abilities while writing - I feel more comfortable with analyzing my thoughts through writing.  This metacognitve ability showed me how much reflecting on reading through writing can help a person to understand (or start to understand why they don't understand).

The other objectives were also addressed in the blog, in the form of the content, as opposed to the process, of my posts.  As we discussed genres of chapters in Hicks, I was able to use this blog to reflect on my learning.  Writing helped me to organize my thoughts and ask questions about the readings or discussions or presentations.  Since we covered the course objectives in various ways over the semester, I have discussed these items in this blog - and therefore this blog helped me to learn and master these course objectives. 

For the genres, we had presentations on what Tompkins (2012) views as the major genres, and we developed our genre pieces project.  Both of these covered learning objective 1.  However, I was able to write in posts about some of the genres that we covered.  My understanding of the journal genre, biography genre, and persuasive genre was expanded through posts in this blog.

Our class discussion on purpose and the genre pieces project help me to develop objective 2, and the roles of purpose and audience.  While I did not discuss this topic as much - this blog helped me to direct my focus in discussions in class.  I often asked myself, "Who is my audience for my blog?" and "What is the purpose for writing this blog?" in class and when writing.  These questions helped me to direct my writing, but they also led me to a fuller understanding of how much influence the purpose and audience have on writing.  My posts would have been vastly different for a blog whose audience was outside of my academic classes and whose purpose was to entertain or educate instead of reflect.

The presentations on Hicks has helped me to understand how assessment plays a vital role in writing and reading.  When teachers understand what the goal is for students to read and write, they can better develop purposes for reading and writing - which, time and again, is very important for readers and authors.


I have always been a fan of learning logs.  Now, I see how appropriate digital leanring logs could be for the classroom.  I think that developing interesting and intelligent prompts is a very important part of the process - especially for high school and younger students.  This is someting I definitely wwant to integrate into my own classroom.