Rogers 1 Katie Rogers Mr. Neuburger Eng.

102-102 25 July 2012 Final Exam English 102-102 has been an educational class in which my writing has grown and I have become more aware of ways to improve my writing. I have learned not to include personal pronouns, such as I, we, you, use, etc. in formal writing. Sometimes I would forget it is not proper academic writing (such as our research paper) to include these personal pronouns. Learning to form a correct MLA works cited was also a big part of this class and I improved on properly writing a works cited. I also learned to look for the word that in my papers. Many times that can be deleted and the sentence still makes perfect sense. Taking out that can also help the paper flow better. I will definitely be more aware of what I have learned and incorporate it into my future writing. Academic writing does not have to always be three pages. Most of my high school career I had to write at least one page assignments if not two, three, or four pages. In this class I learned that academic writing can be as small as 166 words. Writing response essay challenged me to get to the point of my paper. I did not have extra words to spare to fully explain in detail what I wanted to. This was very hard at times because I am use to having long assignments where I have to include as much detail as possible. Response essay helped me learn how to better form a strong thesis and not stray away from that thesis in the paper. I know I can take what I learned about response essays and use it in future writing, including longer assignments.

Rogers 2 Before this class I had written one big research paper in high school. However, the process was very different from the process we took in this class. My past research paper had to include actual documentation of the research I used with notecards attached and the parts of the article I used highlighted. I liked the process of writing a research paper better in this class because I did not have to do all that and got to really focus on writing a great paper and still properly cited my sources. Using Diigo was also new to me. I am use to printing off all of my research and having a hard copy in front of me to write on and make notes. I liked using Diigo because I could still highlight important parts of the article and all my research was in the same place. It took a while to get use to and will still take some time, but it was neat to see the technology available. I liked the topic of the Holocaust for the research paper. I studied it in high school as most kids did, but never knew the real details behind it. I knew it was an awful event in history, but by researching the topic I feel better educated on the topic and learned details that most people probably do not know (such as how the Nazis systemically murdered six million people with no interruption). We used a lot of technology in this class I had not used before or even seen. We first used Blog Spot. I had never used Blog Spot before and was not even really aware of it. It is a great way for people to share their ideas, opinions, research, etc. I really enjoyed being able to read other peoples papers and see what they had to say about certain topics. I would most likely not have this opportunity in an English class during the school year. I think it is important to see other peoples view and using Blog Spot allowed the class to do so. We also used Scribd to embed documents into our digital portfolios in Blog Spot. Once again, I had never used this website before and did not know it existed. This also helps people share their work with others. Scribd made it really easy to upload my documents onto Blog Spot, but it took some time to

Rogers 3 learn how to correctly do that. We also used Twitter, one website I had actually used before and currently use. Twitter was a great way to have classroom discussions because everyone was able to participate and did not have to speak in front of the class. We also could directly reply to what others were saying and anyone could join in the conversation. I had never used Twitter that way before, but really enjoyed it. Easy Bib was another tool we used to cite our sources. I have used this website many times before and really like it because it is a very easy way to correctly form a works cited page. One of the last websites we used was Diigo, which I already discussed previously. As I mentioned, I had never used Diigo before, but after I got the hang of it I realized it made it easy to research. I am not sure I would use it again since I am so use to printing out my research and physically being able to see the articles (this is probably due to years in debate and reading over hundreds of brief books for research), but I would not be against using Diigo again. The technology used in this class really enhanced my learning and gave me new tools to use in the future. Overall, I enjoyed the class very much and do not have many complaints. As mentioned in class before, you take late work, which I have never really been a fan of teachers doing because I feel it is a little unfair to the students who turn their work in on time. However, I am aware it is summer school and many students would not have very good grades if late work is not accepted. I am not sure of your grading policy for late work, but I think it would be reasonable and fairer to students who turn their work in on time to take some points off the late work. That would be my biggest suggestion for making the class better. I feel like instructions were given very well and assignments were clear, which makes the students lives a lot easier (and I am sure yours as well because you do not get as many questionswith the exception of Maddie, haha). Thank you for a great class and enjoy the rest of summer break!