Reflective Journal 1: Creating an Academic blog

In this module, I have learned how to make an academic blog for ELT purposes. My classmates and I discussed how to use blogs in language teaching and the elements we could use in the class blog in Canvas and shared our blogs in the Zoom meeting in the breakout room.

From the discussion in Canvas, I was fascinated by various ways of using blogs suggested by my classmates. For learning, they are used for not only sharing authors' opinions and knowledge but also enhancing the interaction between teachers and students or encouraging introverted students to raise their voices in online classes. This broadened my knowledge of the benefits of blogs. Thanks to their sharing, I got a lot of interesting ideas for designing my class blog which was introduced in the third lesson. 

In the breakout room, we took turns presenting how we design a blog with specific elements such as what purpose of the blog, who the audience and author are, and what tools were used to design it. I learned a lot of lessons from my classmates' presentations and feedback to make my blog be better.

One valuable point I got from my instructor is the logical organization of the course, which I will apply to my teaching. Firstly, the Canvas platform was used in the course with very clear objectives and content for each module, as well as detailed material resources. Secondly, she was consistent with the disciplines and the rules, especially being on time. Finally, she encouraged the learners' co-constructivism by maximum students' talking time by letting them discuss in the breakout rooms, and make a mini presentation to teachers and their classmates. Therefore, the lesson was really productive even though we learned online.