WEEK 1: Designing and Posting to Your Idea Blog!

Welcome all to my model idea blog! I have created this space to help guide students in creating their own blogs, and also to explore my own thinking during this unit. In this space, I will post suggestions for weekly writing and my own responses to those choices.

A blog can serve many purposes; mostly, it is like an online journal. Some blogs are really informal, and some are more professional in nature. For our purposes, we will uses our blogs to trace our thinking each week over the course of this unit, culminating in a longer post that synthesizes some of those ideas. This is a creative space for you to cultivate your voice; you may, of course, use first person and seek always to find personal connections between our class topics and your own experiences. This is also, however, an academic space. We will use our writing here to not only share ideas and sharpen our thinking, but also to cultivate our skills as clear and polished writers.

After you create your blog this week, take some time to design this space so it represents you. You can do that through your blog description and through the gadgets you choose to include. You can see on my blog that I included an image and also a widget called a ClustrMap that shows where different people have viewed this blog space. There are many other widgets you can add to your blog, some available through Blogger, and some available through other sites (Here are some suggestions!)

For your first post, consider the following suggestions for what to write about:

• Discuss what is standing out to you about the question of responsibility so far after our first two Free Thinking Flex lessons and after reading two acts in Macbeth. What has stood out to you the most and/or what do you keep returning to in your mind?
• Discuss a comment or idea made by a classmate during discussion that you agree or disagree with. This could have been during our end of Act 1 discussion last week when we ranked responsibility or during any other lesson.

Use this first post to really establish your voice. You are sharing your thinking on our class content, but you are also working to connect to your audience and write something interesting to read. How do you create strong voice in your writing? Check out this article "The Easy Peasy Method for Finding Your Voice" to help guide you. I look forward to seeing what you make of your online spaces.

References: Quill image