For the end of week 9 you wrote a blog that analyzed your progress with 3 specific course objectives. Copy the text from that blog and paste it into a new Google Doc (once you create the Google Doc, set the share settings so that anyone with the link can comment or edit). This will become the development part of your Final Reflection Essay.
Read through it again, taking into account every sentence, adding details and making sure that you follow this formula to analyze what you learned and connect it to an objective.
1. Fully describe the assignment you were working on and what you did
2. Fully describe what you learned from it, connecting what you learned to something specific from the course objectives
3. Show evidence of what you learned by quoting a before/after piece of writing or showing a screenshot of your work, or some other embedded file to show proof of what you learned.
PART TWO: WRITE A BEFORE/AFTER DESCRIPTION OF YOURSELF
Write two new parts for your final reflection essay—one that describes where you were with the literacy skills we practiced in this class at the beginning of week 1, and one that describes where you are now, at the end of the quarter.
Here are some of the literacy skills (think of it as your toolkit for communicating)—that we practiced a lot this quarter (this list is not all-inclusive–you may think of other skills to write about too)
close, careful reading (also called “critical reading”)
reading with a purpose
speaking to others about academic topics (informal groups and formal presentations)
writing with details
writing narratives using story elements
writing with specific stylistic elements
using multimedia–creating multimedia like websites, videos, audio files, presentations
practicing with grammar, language, and usage at Connect (practice sessions)
learning new vocabulary and practicing with using it in sentences
Write one snapshot of yourself at the beginning of the term–use details. It might be one paragraph, or it might be 2–up to you. Details are important. Then write another snapshot of yourself now.
PART THREE: PUT IT TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST DRAFT OF YOUR REFLECTION ESSAY
Put your snapshot of yourself at the beginning of the term first
Then comes the blog from last week–the analysis of your learning toward 3 specific objectives
(You can add more analysis in the middle part if you there are other objectives you would like to cover–you can also rewrite some of this if you don’t think you did a particularly good job with the blog, or if you want to focus on other objectives than the ones you wrote about)
Last comes the snapshot of you at the end of the term.
So the overall organization of your final reflection essay:
1. Me in Week 1 (in terms of the skills we were learning in this class)
This should be a minimum of 1 paragraph, but you will get a higher grade if you write more and have more details
2. Minimum of 3 examples of how you’ve learned, using the formula above
This part should be a minimum of 6 paragraphs: for each of the 3 objectives:1 paragraph to describe the assignment and to describe what you did, and 1 paragraph to describe what you learned, show an example of it, and tie what you learned to a specific course objective.
3. Me in Week 10 (in terms of the skills we were learning in this class).
This should be a minimum of 1 paragraph, but you will get a higher grade if you write more and have more details
Once you’ve got the parts together, read back through it and create coherence between the pieces–turn it into an essay form. Make sure you have a TOPIC SENTENCE at the beginning of each paragraph that lets your reader know what that paragraph will focus on.
Your essay should answer these questions: What progress did I make toward the course objectives? Where did I start and where am I now?
