Blog Project Reflection
Viertes Semester Deutsch
When this Blog was assigned, I didn’t feel any particular way about it. I thought, “Okay a blog, I can do that.”
This was a
project that got me into using German creatively. I remember when I would learn
English in school, they would encourage us to write stories or poems, and this is very similar in my mind.
This project is showing us the more practical, albeit still fun, uses for German
online and in our every day. Commenting in German helped to get a dialogue
going between students that I hadn’t previously seen. I also appreciated how
the project was spaced out with a week of pins and then a week of blogging. It
made it all very manageable and not too overwhelming.
I did anticipate that this would be a very difficult
assignment given the open-endedness of the prompt. Something surrounding German
culture wasn’t going to be that hard to find, given that German culture could be
anything ranging from an article about a new restaurant opening in Köln to a
German blog about the new Deadpool movie. I knew it was going to be interesting
to explore as many outlets as possible for my pins and research. The problem
was choosing what to write about week-to-week.
If I were given a blog assignment in any other class, I
would have likely carried it out the same way: writing about what I like.
Unfortunately, what I like has a lot of technical jargon, which lead me to
wonder if I could use terms that I only knew in English on a blog that was
supposed to be all in German.
My first blog post, which I accidentally wrote not about German culture, showed much
simpler grammar with little steps outside of my comfort zone. I would stretch a
sentence out here, or attempt to better use adjectives in another spot, but it
wasn’t anything to write home about. My last blog post, which I wrote a little
bit about my experience growing up with German culture (wishing to tie in the
Deutsch im Ausland theme of our last chapter), shows a better grasp of the
concepts I was reaching for in the beginning of the year. I made better use of
adjectives, prepositions, and other grammatical tools that we learned about
throughout this year.
For future students working on this project, I would
probably suggest brainstorming with vocabulary or small sentences before you
begin writing. As with any longer writing project, you want to make sure you
are covering everything you want to cover and that you have enough content to
meet your word count.
In the future, I might want to work on this blog, possibly
going back and reading it over the summer and correcting it. I might even
choose to share it with more people than those just in my German class. As for
next year, I will refer back
to the grammar we worked on and the vocabulary we learned this year to broaden
my writing and improve my communication.
I really enjoyed getting to know everyone a little bit better through your blogs, and I hope they were able to learn a little bit about me!
I really enjoyed getting to know everyone a little bit better through your blogs, and I hope they were able to learn a little bit about me!
~Alyssa
