What went down on Wednesday?

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Seriously cheesy title today. Seriously. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I won’t let it happen again.

Well, I’m not making any promises.

OK, “So, what did go down on Wednesday anyway?” you’re probably wondering. (Or maybe not, maybe I’ve already lost you.) I teach 2 courses on Wednesdays; Communication Technologies and Business Communication. And, I thought Comm Tech was fun yesterday. I mean, sure it could have gone a bit more smoothly, but this is the first time I’m teaching this course, and I still have a lot of kinks to work out. 

Why was class so much fun yesterday? Well, we finally got down to creating blogs. (Yay!) I seriously (I say “seriously” a lot don’t I? And use parentheses a lot too, I should work on that) would love to work with blogs all day every day. I think it would be great fun to help people set up their own blogs for a living and set them off in the right direction. In fact, if I could get a PhD in blogging, I totally would.

Like I said, I still have a lot of kinks to work out in this course, and I’m already planning to make some changes to the assignment. I don’t think it will achieve the objectives I’m hoping for the way it’s set up right now. I could write a whole other post on that, and maybe I will another day. My main objective for today is to share links to my students’ blogs. It would be totally awesome if you could have a look at a couple of them and give them a little encouragement and feedback. I do so hope they keep up with their blogs after this course is over.

Student Blogs

• Blogging Newbie
• God’s Fedora Punk (this student already had a blog, so I’m letting him use what he already has and just pushing him to improve it with the aim of improving his traffic numbers.)
• Sarayeske
• TLHERRICK (Some of them are still thinking of names for their blogs.)
• Learning to Relax… Take a Mini Vacation
• OCakes
• Austin’s blog
• Hazel Applegate
• How to Organize Your Life
• Mike Bzzz

Please keep in mind, the students just created these blogs yesterday. So, they still have a lot of work to do. I think one of the things I need to do next is to create a weekly checklist of items for them to make sure they’ve completed on their blogs so they can improve each week. For example, this week, all of those “Just another WordPress blog” taglines need to disappear.

So, that was Communication Technologies for this week. Business Communication was cool too, my students spent a large part of the class working on their final collaborative analytical report that they’ll be turning in a few weeks from now (it’s an accelerated course.) We’ve spent a lot of time this semester playing around with Survey Monkey so they can create online surveys to collect primary research for their research reports. I figured, as long as I’m sharing links, I’ll also share links to their surveys. The more survey responses they get, the better. Please help my students out and take their surveys:

• MP3 player use in the workplace
• Jams and Jellies

Do you have any ideas for how I can help my students improve their blogs? If so, comment below.

~Mandy Webster

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