Peace Out

When I was thinking about my final reflection blog, I found myself looking back through the syllabus and class blog to refresh myself about what all we covered in class. What struck me was that, for the most part, we talked about everything all semester. Topics from different weeks were always revisited, which I think is a sign of a good class. I was pretty intimidated by the class blog at first, but it turns out that blogging is really fun! I might even start my own blog about living in France next year (even though I have always sworn that I would never become one of those study abroad bloggers).

Thanks, Ryan

Writing for BuzzFeed was one of my favorite projects of the semester. BuzzFeed is entertaining and accessible, and I think it could be a good way to get important information and news out to people. Condensing things into short lists and including popular memes is great for frivolous information, but it can also work for more serious matters. For example, this article tries to make North Carolina voters more informed, and another explains the Syrian Civil War by using clips from The Hills. By putting important information into a familiar format, BuzzFeed could disseminate more valuable information than “19 Celebrities That Look Like Lamp Shades.”

The Wikipedia creation was more challenging. At least, writing a new article was anyway. (Update: my estimated wait time has now gone from 3 weeks to a month.) This just makes Wikipedia seem more and more reliable…people have to go through a lot to get articles posted.

So many blogs, so little time!

Entering a blogosphere was the most frustrating task for me, but it got easier after I discovered Feedly. Feedly also made it easier for me to go down rabbit holes and get lost looking at random blogs for hours, but mostly it’s a great organizing tool that I’ll definitely continue using after this class. I wanted to keep up with blogs about foreign language education advocacy, but there weren’t many blogs dedicated to this subject. I found plenty of teachers’ blogs, and they have great ideas and resources about foreign language teaching. I also found tons of French language learning blogs, like Talk in French (who requested to follow me on Twitter, NBD) and My French Life. Some education blogs, like Edutopia, had individual posts dedicated to the importance of foreign language education, but they were few and far between. There were also about foreign languages in general, like Lingua Franca and Language Log, but again, posts about advocacy were scarce.

I couldn’t resist a good Xzibit French teacher meme

For my Bizzaro Research Paper, I created an infographic about learning French. As part of my Spread the Message task, I shared my creation on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Hopefully this will be useful for students, teachers, and anyone interested in the French language. Overall, this class has made me think about things that I take for granted every day as a digital native. I like that we were all able to kind of customize our creations to incorporate something that interests us, but we were all linked because of the core focus of the class.

#bye

P.S. I still can’t figure out the whole GIF thing. Ugh.