Reflection on the Blogging Experience

1. At the beginning of the course, I really looked forward to the course blog.  Then I got my job back and reality of time constraints kicked in and I simply didn’t have time to keep up with it. 
2. The nature of this course – the hours we spent working in other schools, completing indirect hours doing things for our practicum supervisors at the schools, the class time – make the blog something of an afterthought, or at least it did for me.  After completing the first several weeks of blogging and finding out that my comments weren’t posting, I became frustrating and put blogging even further down on my list of priorities.  I really expected to enjoy the blog when we were first told we would be writing one, but the fact that there was very little feedback given and that we had to search each blog out individually, made conversing through them very difficult. 
3. Frustration and anxiety.  I am a procrastinator by nature.  My motto is, “Nothing instigates progress like the last minute!” Once I fell behind in keeping up with the blogging assignments, I really FELL BEHIND!  I was trying to complete my hours, complete assignments for EDGC 682, and take care of my kids and the blog just was not something I made time for.  It didn’t help that blog sites are completely proxied at work and I have little to no time on the computer at home, between wrangling a 3 year old and fighting two teenagers for the laptop.
4. See number 3!
5. I’m sure that my reflection is skewed by the fact that I did so much of my blogging at the end, at once, but I really don’t feel that the blog would have enhanced my reflection had I done it every week.  I talked to several of my classmates and they seemed to share similar feelings, even though they did much better about keeping their blog posts up to date.
6. Had I had more time, I think I would have liked blogging more.  I also enjoyed blogging in posts where we didn’t have an assignment per say.  Some of the assignments seemed repetitive and I found myself rambling a lot.
7. As I have already touched on, time constraints made blogging a nuisance.
8. I would suggest requiring one blog assignment per week, with fewer assignment-type posts.  I think, as professional adults, we are all capable of including reflections of progress and idea-sharing without specific assignments.
9. As this was my first experience with blogging, I am not sure if there is an easier way to keep up with other blog posts?  Sometimes I felt that it was so time consuming to try to track down classmate’s posts that I just didn’t.  Is there any way to have an interactive class blog?  Technology, as I’m sure you know, is not my thing so I’m just thinking out loud here….