Reflection

In my opinion the blogging assignments have been pretty fun, but i'm not sure how helpful it will be to us for college next year. As far as how much we learned on the subject, The Holocaust, was great. I learned so much more about it and now i have a little better understanding of how much really took place back in that day. It is a very interesting topic. Blogging does help me to write better because i am able to express my words and opinions but in a good way because you make us write with proper grammar. When blogging we have to write alot so i do think that it helps us in our writing, and to find better ways to express ourselves in a respectful way.

I think that blogging could be a good thing, but in small proportions. As a senior, I feel that I need to know more about writing papers than blogging for when I go on to college. I don't think that just throwing a research paper on us will prepare us either. I think that we need to break it down and learn the fundamentals of a paper, rather than just writing one. Again, I did like blogging, I thought it was fun and helpful to be able to work with other students my age and write back in forth our opinions and have discussions between us.

Reflectionnnnnn :D

Well. My opinion on this whole blogging ordeal was half and half. I enjoyed the whole topic of the blogging. The Holocaust interests me in good ways. But, i don't think that blogging will help us in the near future of college. I think that as Juniors this would of been a good activity for them at that age. But, as Seniors (i know people will hate this when i say this) i think we need to do more on how to write papers, and techniques of writing. I also think that we didn't get to express our feelings as we wanted to. You would get us in trouble for saying things that weren't even "hurtful," whenever they could say rude things and we couldn't even defend ourselves without you yelling at us, or you deleting one of our comments. But other than that, I didn't mind it. It was fun

Like or Dislike!

At the begining of the semester i didnt really likr the blogging. As time went on however, I started to like it. The holocaust topic is what kept me interested. The discussion were very opinonated and strongly supported. I think being able to say what I think, but also knowing what others thought and felt was the best part. This project not only helped us learn about a very important history event, but also helped show what these people had to go through this trying times. All in all i liked the blogging I think that you should continue this next year and years to come.

Thoughts on Blogging:)

I've never been on a blog before so this one was an interesting one to start with. First off, I would like to say that I really did like reading the book Night, and I learned a lot from it. I never could imagine just how horrible the conditions of the Holocaust were and reading the book gave me a better idea of it. I also liked reading the thoughts and ideas in other peoples posts and learning how much different people are. I enjoyed being able to comment and express my opinions on what others had said. I liked how some of the topics were deeper than others so they required more thought and feeling in the answers. What was hard about commenting on the posts was trying to come up different, non-fluff comments for posts that pretty much said the same things. Also, it was hard to write what I wanted without getting in trouble for being to mean. I'm very opinionated so it was tough writing what I thought without being to critical. What I did not like about this blog was that sometimes we were not allowed to write what we really wanted, which I do not think is right since this is a blog and half the time we were asked for our opinions. Sometimes we were criticized for being to mean or blunt which I do not think we should have been because we were just saying our opinions. I liked blogging better than doing a research paper. Overall there were more likes than dislikes, so it was a pretty good experience.

Melanie Atwell

This Blog Experience

This blogging experience has taught me more things about myself than anything else. I learned, for me, it is easier to criticise other people than to build them up. I realized it is easier to be a jerk than to be nice on a deep level. I would rather give fluff answers than really get into a deep conversation when I disagree with the other person. On a different note, I learned how to blog since I never have blogged before. I also gained more knowledge about the Holocaust overall. This blog helped me see how other people veiw the Holocaust in a different light. I must say I would rather do blogs than write research papers. This was easier to go on and come up with new ideas than to sit down and write a couple page research paper. In the beginning, I would have never said this. I had a deep hatred of computers but now Im ok with them.

Semester Reflection

This project we were doing this semester was actually pretty interesting. The reason I say this is because I learned a lot about the Holocaust that I didn't know from before. After reading the Book "Night" and answering some of the questions that were asked got me thinking about a lot of things involving forgiveness, and faith among other things. It made me realize that if you have faith or even if you don't that forgiveness is one of the key things in life. I say this because people should forgive one another so that the world isn't a dark selfish chaotic place, that if you forgive someone you'll be able to live through life better and not as a dark shell.
I liked the way Mr.Neuburger had us do our assignments, I really like the blog ideas and interacting with other schools and getting a different point of view of things. It is always good to get a different point of view on things that way you can compare and work discussions that may arise.
Though the only thing I don't like about this is that you had to comment on every little thing. It got annoying after a while. Besides that I didn't think there was anything wrong with this project.

In the course of the past few weeks we have been blogging on several topics of the Holocaust. During this time my knowledge over the vastness of this topic ranging from forgiveness through putting God on Trial has grown. When we all first started this project my knowledge of this era in our history was very little but has grown over the projects. I have enjoyed blogging with my classmates and by myself, it has helped me to communicate better with my classmates in writing and expressing what is on my mind. When i first started blogging it was hard for me to start off with topics, but as we worked together my we became more open to each other and it helped alot that we all had the same views about our faith and the way we all wrote.

At the beginning of the year we all started out writing research papers, I'm glad that we are not working on them now. This blogging has helped out a lot by giving me practice in starting out on a random subject and writing a full paragraph on that topic. Overall i have enjoyed this experience with my classmates and another school. It helped show me all of the different views of this world.

My Final Post!

By doing this blog I learned that I can be a good writer. I have never done a blog before so I learned a lot about it by going through this experience. Also I guess I can be a blunt person some times. It taught me how you communicate better with people through writing where you do not come off as rude or mean. I really like how we got to comment on other people's blog, it showed me the areas I need to work on.

What I liked was reading the book, Night, it made you really think about the Holocaust did to people. I did not like having to write the research paper at the beginning of the year. We had just got back to school so I was not ready for that. It was to demanding of you to make us do that at a early stage of school. But I did learn a lot more imformation about the Holocaust that I did not already know. It really prepared me for the upcoming blog. The whole blog experience was alright. I did not really like how we could not put our true feelings on the comments. Even though they would have been really mean. It was weird at first having to do the blog, but it got more normal during the end. Commenting was really what I did not like having to do. It was hard to find things to talk about on them that were not "fluffy". Other than that I thought that this was a fun experience and enjoyed it.

Blogging Reflection

I have learned an incredible amount through this blogging experience. I really did not have any prior knowledge of the Holocaust. The blogging experience has been great for me in both learning and working with others. It is been very helpful in letting me work with others and getting others input which has helped me to broaden my perspective.

However, I think we should have spent more time working on research papers and writing in M.L.A. style. We should work on researching and writing for a paper more often in my opinion.

Overall, this was a good thing for us to do because we were still writing and getting critiqued on our writing. It helped us because we got more than one person's point of view on our posts which brought up more things for us to work on. This will help me to form into a better writer in the future.

-Tyler Abma

Work and Play all Darn Day

Learning about the Holocaust brought many feelings to me that were both positive and negative at times. Reading and studying about how people were affected and all of the torture and loss of the Holocaust definitely brought a sad negative feeling, but it is important to learn what happened in the past so it can be prevented in the future, and the souls of the past can be fondly remembered. My research paper that I wrote over the Holocaust was based around Dr. Mengele and his medical experiments at Auschwitz. I was horrified at the level of cruelty Dr. Mengele went to, and mostly towards children. I learned so many things, not necessarily that I wanted to know, but it is important to know. The blogging experience has been completely positive! Of course there was a bit of disagreement between my College English class and the McCool class, but everyone has their own opinion and I think we did a good job respecting that. Commenting on posts has given everyone constructive criticism and its an awesome way for us to be able to have the chance to understand how others view and interpret our writing so that we can practice and get better, because nobody is perfect. We also had many chances to show our creativity while showing how much we learned. An example of this would be the powerpoint we created and presented to the class. I like powerpoints because they are easy and you can throw your own personal style and fun in there with colors and patterns! So overall this has been a positive and fun experience and I'm going to miss it in a way after I graduate.

Opinion on first semester

I have learned many things this semester and enjoyed much of it, but I am not sure how the Holocaust is going to help me later on if I decide to go to college. I know that the Holocaust may have just been something Mr.N wanted us to learn about but also use our English skills within all of the projects. I did not enjoy although I did learn a lot from the research paper we did at the beginning of the year. I do think that we had to write the paper a bit soon and we should have learned more about the Holocaust before writing it, for the reason that we could have put a lot more detail into the paper and would not have just tried to force things into it. I did not like reading the book "Night." I am not a big reader I know it may help us but I personally think that reading is something you should do on your own time. The last thing we have done is this blog. I really enjoyed it, and I wish we could do more things like this in all of our classes, this has probably been one of the funnest things we have done in English. I really liked talking to people outside of our class and hearing all of there opinions. I though it was cool being able to comment on other peoples post letting them know my opinion and hearing what there responses to that were. Overall I think this English class has helped me out a lot and has prepared me for college.

Some Sort of Reflection

Studying the Holocaust in depth, as we did this semester, was kind of difficult. It is hard to learn about something so horrific. I always thought I had a good grasp on what happened, but I can't tell you how many times my jaw dropped this semester, or a tear escaped from my eye in class. The real stories of the people who went through that make it so much more real. You learn that this mass killing happened, but when you think about how we live now you kind of imagine some villain in a movie or some horror novel. Its hard to grasp that it really happened and not more than eighty years ago. I have grandparents that saw the holocaust, that are still alive today. How can something so horrible have happened so recently in history? I'd like to think I'm a part of a people that has good buried deep down, no matter how messed up their exterior is. The fact of the matter is that the Nazis cannot have good anywhere in their sadistic souls so it makes me question the people I live around. More than anything this experience has opened my eyes to see that if you are in the dark about your history, your future can seem blurry. You should learn from the mistakes of the past and know when to fight your fight.

Blogging was a great experience. This is actually not my first experience with blogging, I blog in another one of your classes and I have blogged online for a few years. I really liked that there was not really any actual pencil/pen work to do in the class, because I can type so much faster than I write!! Its a lot easier to go back and edit your work and keep everything organized when you never have to wonder what something said or think you lost it. It was also a lot easier than I would have imagined to team up with another class and do collaborations. I liked how that went, but I think that in the future we should get web cams so that instead of always doing our ideas against theirs, we could do mixed groups and really get diverse ideas and conversations going. It would be really cool to talk with these people, and actually hear their voice. I am very opinionated and this experience was one of the few times in school where people asked me, "How do YOU feel about that?" Putting your thoughts and ideas out there is an awesome thing. When someone would comment me, I thought to myself that its an amazing thing when people can connect and understand each other. Whether we all agreed or not this experience not only taught me about our past, but also how to work with people from all walks of life.

Reflection

This experience throughout the semester has been amazing. I was never really interested in the Holocaust, until this class. I learned so much about the holocaust and now i know how important it was. I had actually read the book "night" once before this class and didn't really like it, never really understood it. Mr. N helped me with that, this blogging helped a lot also. I had know idea how to blog, i didn't even know what blogging was until this class lol.. I got to other students from somewhere else, there was a lot of criticizing but you learn how other people think and how they feel on the matter also. It is nice to have people you agree, and also people that you can argue your point with. It is amazing how you get to have your own opionion on everything. All and All i love this semester it was a wonderful experience that i would like to have in more classes.

Thank you Mr. Sir------Ashley

What was the question again?

My view over this semesters assignments and activities is positive. Going over the Holocaust was a good thing for myself and many of my other classmates. The blogging taught me a lot about being nice to other people no matter how many grammatical errors they make, and with that, how to look over the errors and into the content of what is being said. The thing which touched my heart and I learned so much from was the video clip of the man on the train. This man had driven the cattle trains so often he knew exactly how to control the train so it would stop right in front of the Auschwitz sign. The only thing I would change would be the research paper. It was excruciating, especially when they had to be done the first week of school. It nearly killed us all. Although I did not like to do this paper I did learn a lot researching about it that I had never before known about the Holocaust. When we shared our power points as a class I had a greater opportunity to learn what others had learned and to expand my knowledge of this topic.
Love, Jordan Byrum

Reflection

The blogging experience has been different, but interesting. At first I did not like blogging, at all. Once we got further into the assignments, blogging became more interesting. I really liked the heated discussions, and even was interested to hear the different opinions of the other kids. Even though I, as well as others, got kind of defensive of our opinions, it was what made the whole experience interesting. The specific assignments brought up alot of interesting topics like forgiveness and faith, and really made you have to think for yourself. And I really enjoyed actually having to think seriously about things that actually mattered. I have also learned alot about the Holocaust from the different perspectives of Holocaust survivors. I do wish we could do more writing assignments though. It seems to me that with the commenting our writing isn't focused on as much. I know that when I go to college next year I want to be confident of my writing techniques. With the commenting and group posts, (even though we are graded on it) we don't really get any feedback on if what we are writing is correct.