The Benefits of Blogging

I hope you've read and watched the video which were the content of my previous post. If you haven't, please go to my previous post before you continue reading on this post. It's important to understand what blogging is and how you can go about it. Most importantly, you need to keep in mind what you should and shouldn't be doing in blogging. If you have gone through my prior post (the post just before this one), you may read further and, should you have any questions or clarifications to make, please don't hesitate to ask me in class or leave a message through chat or post. Don't forget to check out my response on your online queries.

While you are getting ready for the research paper, this blogging activity will hopefully give you opportunities to express yourselves and be heard by others. It will also give you a chance to look at how others express themselves and provide you with input you may have missed or overlooked in the learning process.

Here is a MUST READ article on the benefits of blogging. Remember that as you surf through the blogs, you will find both experts and amateurs who are blogging, sharing their thoughts and ideas. Take time to read posts on topics that interest you or that concern your field of study. Right click on the title below to open a new window and read the article.

Seven Benefits of Blogging to Your Personal Growth

Students also find blogging really helpful. Here's what they have to say:

Explore for yourself what blogging can do for you. Blogging tasks will not be very often but you can, on a personal level, blog all you like on any topic that interests you as often as you want to.

Just to give you an idea on what people do when they blog, here are sample blogs written by different people for different purposes:

Family blog
Poetic expressions
Book reviews
Hobbies
On nursing
On lingusitics

The first blogging task will soon be given. For now, you may try posting anything you want on your blog just to get started and get a feel of the blogging experience.

Keep writing. Keep blogging. Keep up. Keep on.

Welcome English 2 Students of SY 2011-2012

Welcome everyone to this semester and the experience of blogging.
To start with, watch this video on how to blog.

After you have created your blogsite and are ready to start with your first blog, please read this.
Click on the topic to open a new window.

Five Blogging Etiquette Tips for Beginning Bloggers

So looking forward to your blog posts.
Keep writing. Keep blogging. Keep up. Keep on.

Questionnaire on Blogging

Fill out this questionnaire.
Click on the lick to access it.
Download or save as document
and send the filled out form to english-1-blogging@googlegroups.com
Write as subject of the email: Questionnaire (Family Name)

Perception on the Blogging Activity

Keep writing. Keep blogging. Keep up. Keep on.

Post Test Activities

I hope you did well in the departmental exam.

While grammar is important in writing, it is not the only important component in writing. Grammar is a tool to help you shape your expression so that you can better deliver your message with ease and clarity. Grammar makes your readers understand better your message. On the other hand, it takes more than just correct grammar to deliver effective messages. Written discourse requires ability to weave your thoughts in a such way that they form a single impression. A writer needs focus and careful planning which are skills only developed in actual writing.

Thus, the next online tasks will be skill-building activities  for you. They will require you to read your workbooks again, browse online sources,  synthesize what you have read and share them to the public.
These activities are meant to prepare you for the next level of writing, specifically writing demands in your English 2 classes.

Each task is hyperlinked. You need to click on each to know what you need to do. The following tasks will be treated as major exams with corresponding points.

1. Descriptive Writing
2. Definition Writing
3. Video Commentary

Deadline of all these tasks is on October 23, 2011.
Once you have completed all the tasks, you will be sent a short questionnaire which you need to fill out and send through email at english-1-blogging@googlegroups.com

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to leave me a message on the chat box.

Keep writing. Keep blogging. Keep up. Keep on.

My Fascination for Short Films

Tonight, I have the privilege to enjoy watching the 10 short films prepared by Nestle for its 100 years of  providing good food to the Filipino people. I like watching short films because they are usually simple yet very meaningful and usually laden with a message. I like films that make me think a little and ponder more on life and living.

If you missed watching them, you can have a look at them through this blog Kasambuhay-Habangbuhay.
Watch them and tell me which film you like best and why.

See you in class!

Keep writing. Keep blogging. Keep up. Keep on.

Food for Thought: The measure of success

After you've finished reading the first story in the English workbook, "Nobody Stops to Say Thank You Anymore," I'd like you to watch a very short film on youtube video.

Then answer the following questions:
1. How do you think people value family these days?
2. How would you show you value your parents 10 years from now?
3. In what way can you say "Thank You" to your parents now?

Blog the answers as task#3 and title it, "I stop to say Thank you (the person you want to thank)."

Click on this link to watch Rich son Poor son

Keep writing. Keep blogging. Keep up. Keep on.

Introducing Daily Dose of English

Then go to English phrases with "cat"
This is good for building vocabulary.
Follow it on youtube and learn.

See you!

Keep writing. Keep blogging. Keep up. Keep on.

Reading Strategies

Hi! In class, we've talked about reading strategies and the ways by which you have been applying or will be applying these to your own reading experience. Because you are now in college, you are expected to increase your reading time as the academe demands this from you. How you will succeed depends on your determination to really put to heart what you have learned here.

Allow me to share with you some Reading Comprehension Tips and Speed Reading Strategies. Some of the points discussed here have also been discussed in class but it would be good to re-read them so you'd likely to remember the tips that will aid you in your academic success.

You may also check the list on METACOGNITIVE BEHAVIORS OF GOOD AND POOR READERS and see which one are you.

Well, I hope you have set a goal for yourself as the first semester opens. By now, you should start looking for a good book to read. I might ask you to read a book soon and then share in class what you've read about.

Keep writing. Keep blogging. Keep up. Keep on.

Welcome English 1 Students to the First Semester of SY 2011-2012

Welcome freshmen students to MSU IIT. Welcome to my English class and to blogging.

For some of you, blogging could be an entirely new experience. It may take awhile for you to get used to it or accept it as part of your life, at least for this semester.

So what exactly is blogging? Cambridge online dictionary defines it as a diary where one regularly records one's thoughts, opinions and experiences on the internet for other people to read. In the online computer  glossary of terms, a blog, also called a web blog, is a person's journal on the web. "Blogging" means an activity of updating one's blog and the person who does this is called a "blogger".

So how did blogging begin? One blogger shared the history of blogging which could be highly technical and full of IT terms most average internet users wouldn't understand or even care.  The idea of blogging evolved naturally as people sought each other's thoughts, opinions and feelings. More and more average users caught up with the idea as the need to communicate and get connected with people builds up each day. Its origin cannot be solely claimed by anyone. Brilliant people have since innovate on existing internet tools and so the options and opportunities to be a voice and listen to voices out there continue to increase.

So what does one get out of blogging? The question, of course, is rarely raised by most bloggers who have thankfully found a new way to pen their thoughts down and share their ideas on anything from cooking the best pasta to being a mom of three kids. But if you are seriously asking the question, here are a few benefits shared online by www.a1technology:

1.   Real time discussion: The information that we get from blogs is usually week’s ahead of the press releases and newspapers because bloggers keep looking for new development areas to publish i.e. something which is very new. Discussions and interactions happen on the spot. So there is no delay of information sharing. Blogs act as Real time Forums and one may find answers to one’s queries with a fraction of a second.

2.       Back Links: Through blogging, you can find number of business partners together because people having different interests and thoughts are closely knit with each other.

3.       Regular readership: Blogging helps in gaining regular readership traffic. If a visitor comes to your blog and he likes the stuff, he can permanently subscribe the blog through RSS feeds.

4.       Boost Traffic: Blogs and RSS feeds can make excellent positive change in your web traffic. By adding new content to your site on a regular basis, you ensure that search engine’s spider crawls your site more often. Consistent updating the rich content matter of a keyword chosen by you gives you an added lead also by increasing the number of search terms or keywords that regularly show up in search results. 

5.       Research tool: Blogging is a very powerful tool to collect and aggregate research work, assignment information as well as a powerful means to gather and search the information collected by worldwide researchers. This phenomenon is known as Syndications and RSS is derived from this feature.

6.       Cheap Marketing: By Blogging you can raise your website profile and increase visits to your site. Like we are doing atwww.offshoreoutsourcingworld.com 

7.       Easy Web Publishing Solution: Blog Softwares are easy to use. Updating the weblog is a faster process than seeking a web designer for various changes or managing the coding part and uploading it yourself.  

8.       Blogs as intranet: Blogs, in an intranet environment, can be an excellent way of sharing knowledge within the organization. You can have secure folders in which you can assign different access rights to different users of blog as per your requirement. You need to get yourself build on an application as to share your resources.

9.       Blogs as CMS: Blogs are best content management systems. You can upload videos files, photos, word documents, pdf files, anything you want to store. Navigation system of blogs is very strong as everything is categorized and for every entry there is a permanent link , every entry can be named with a keyword and in built search feature in blogs has made it simply cool to look for any records.

So...

Keep writing. Keep blogging. Keep up. Keep on.