Welcome!

Adapted from Mr. Cantor's AP Psychology Blog

Hello and welcome to your AP Psychology blog. This site will be a useful tool for you to keep up in AP Psych. You will also create your own blog. Read through this whole assignment before beginning to work on your new blog.

Most of you are familiar with the idea of a Blog, which is short for "Weblog," essentially a web space where people can post ideas, opinions, share links, etc. Some popular blog sites with which you are probably familiar include this one, Blogger, but also ones such as MySpace, WordPress, Facebook, and others.What made blogs revolutionary is that they provided authors with the ability to easily share their ideas and resources with audiences in a way that was never possible.

While most of you are familiar with using blogs for social purposes -- to keep in touch with friends, discuss matters of daily life, etc., -- most of you are not familiar with using a blog for academic purposes, to extend conversations that begin in the classroom or with your reading. In this way, academic blogs, while they have a social aspect, are much more focused as learning tools. Blogs have been found to have an enormous positive impact on students, in that they:

*Promote critical and analytical thinking
*Are powerful promoters of creative, intuitive, and associative thinking
*Promote analogical thinking
*Are a powerful medium for increasing access and exposure to quality information, and
*Combine the best of solitary reflection and social interaction

So how will you be using your academic blog in this class?

Good question.

The answer is that you will be using it in several ways. Consider your audience. First, you will be using it to learn how to blog. Remember, your audience for an academic blog is much different than your audience for a social blog. When you are writing for a social blog, your audience usually consists of your immediate social group -- your friends. However, when you are writing an academic blog, your audience is much different, consisting of teachers, professors, scholars, or others throughout the world who may have in interest in your academic topic, so how you express yourself becomes an important focus. For example, you would not write for a teacher or a professor the same way you would text message a friend. The language you use will be much different as will the form and content. You will also be using your blog to complete class writing assignments.

An added bonus is that this medium is paper free, so we're engaging in academic work that is both online and environmentally green.


ASSIGNMENT #1
Creating Your Academic Blog
(If you have already created your blog, skip to Writing Assignment #1)

Even though many of you have social blogs, when you create your academic blog it will have a distinctly different look. Go to Blogger.com to create your site.

Once you have created your site please be sure to post a link on Moodle under "Introductory Assignment" so that we are able be create a link to it this site. (If you have done this already you should see your name - linked to your blog - appear to the left)

For example, the full URL address of this blog is http://dreierwollersheim.blogspot.com./

Your first blog writing assignment should be your first post.

Blog #1
(10 points)

First explain your expectations for this course. What are you looking forward to and/or apprehensive about? What topics are you most excited to learning about? How do you expect this class to be different from your other classes this term?

Next, complete your "normal" blogging assignment with regard to your first reading assignment (Prologue and Chapter 1) **See Weekly Blogging Assignment handout (bright yellow) for further instructions.