FINAL REFLECTION

I noticed that I would tend to pick words that were from my course readings in the beginning but as the class went on and I read other students' posts they inspired me to look outside of my course readings to find words that I would come across everyday.  Initially and throughout the course when I would pick the course related terms they would be words that I knew but that I wanted to clarify to this specific reading or ideas that were in the article.  I think words that have many meanings interest me.  Even though it may mean one thing in a sentence within an article or story, it has multiple meanings across contexts. 

In regard to my routine literacy practices, outside of Nazareth College and outside of my daytime job, I like to read multicultural American Literature but I also enjoy reading novels from other countries and I often use the Booker Prize finalists lists to find interesting novels to read when I am not in school.  When I am in school the only literacy events that I would take place in would be watching television shows on PBS, mostly documentaries and I mostly listen to them rather than watch them as I am usually doing something else such as cooking, doing laundry, getting my clothes ready for the week or cleaning my apartment.  I try to schedule these tasks during times that I can listen to a favorite show such as American Masters or Downton Abbey. 

Though it is not reflected in my blog I often read online news or watch online news videos with my students and my students and I use those vocabulary words that we find and put them on a word wall.  Words that are tier 2 words I will encourage them to learn, tier 1 they mostly know already and tier 3 I will define and let them know if it is content specific.  I keep words on a word wall—for example words that were related to the presidential election.  My students also added words for the word wall as they found them and every day we would check the word wall and review words that we had already gone over and discuss them.  We would also discuss new words that were posted. They also posted questions about that topic.

Since I am keeping a vocabulary blog in two other classes as well as several in my job, I am not sure which vocabulary “blog” or journal was the most influential.  Though I think the most influential is the one that I keep along with my students and second would be the one for my TSL class.  I am already very word conscious and when I see a word that I am not sure about its use in the context I am reading I look it up immediately and try to write it in the margins of the reading and explore it right there for example, how the word is being used in this particular context.  This is why it is difficult for me to transfer the skill of writing in the margins, which I have started doing in the past several years because I was trained in school not to write in books period to writing on a blog online.  For this class to transfer that skill to immediately going online and posting it seems plastic to me right now.   I also did not care for the blogger website that was used and have had difficulty with the GOOGLE sites as a result of the NAZ GOOGLE account.  

Posting on the vocabulary blog was somewhat beneficial to me through writing to learn, though I would prefer to keep a written vocabulary journal or to highlight words and write them in the margins of what I am reading rather than write on a blog.  I am not 100% sold on the diigolet either because it does not exist outside of the program.   I already have too many usernames and passwords to keep straight. I also have difficulty with online texts and being able to edit my written work on the computer-I need to see it in print and interact with it with pen and paper.

My view of vocabulary tests has changed because previously I did not think of having students self select vocabulary for themselves and how that would be possible.  I think it is interesting and I have tried it in my classroom with some success with certain students and with others it is a work in progress.  Overall my students have used the words more frequently and will identify these words in new readings that they do or when they hear them they say, “Hey that word was on my vocabulary list last week.”  For me personally, I was more amazed to see the words that my classmates picked than by words that I picked.  I will continue to learn new words in the same way that I have always learned them.  I will immediately or soon after I read, look them up and I will keep looking the same word up until I feel comfortable with it in the context it is being used in.  I will eventually learn all the definitions and through reading the word in various contexts I get an internal dictionary of the word and its many uses.  I already know where I know this word if I do and I do all of these things unconsciously already as a process since I had very good elementary teachers that taught us to do these as a process, as we read.