Professional Blogging Reflection

Professionalism: Writing Coaching: Living the Achievement Gap

I thought this was my most professional post I wrote this semester. It directly relates to my chosen profession, of course, as I describe the manner in which I have undertaken the process of tutoring high school writers. I thought this post was the best post I made as far as professionalism is concerned.

Design: Mini Multimodal Project

I think the best design I exhibited was in creating the image for the mini mulimodal project post. In this instance I am speaking specifically about the infographic, not as much the post as a whole. I think this was a very fun experience, and I thought that my design in making this graphic was good!

Creativity: Mini Multimodal Project

I think this same post was the one in which I was most creative as well. Here again, I'm referring to the infographic itself, rather than the blog post as a whole, which was the focus of the post and the thing I spent the most time on. I was able to flex my creative juices in a new, interesting way that allowed me to explore a diverse

People's Choice: The Writing Process

I think this post was the best one that I did and most completely fits the criteria that we set as a class for the "People's Choice" award. I talked about my own writing process, and how that differs from the more traditional processes that we are taught in class. I also was able to draw from the readings to cite a source. The graphic I chose is relevant to the topic, as is the link I provided.

For the class's People's Choice Award, I think I would nominate Taylor's blog. All of her posts have been interesting, informative and engaging. Her blog has a very sleek, simple design that I think is very attractive. I also really enjoyed her multimodal project post.

Mini Multimodal Project

For my mini multi-modal composition project, I created the infographic seen to the left (click to enlarge). It's a series preview of this weekend's baseball series between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Pittsburgh Pirates. I had a lot of fun doing it, and it's something I may actually think about doing some more work with to add to my repertoire in my professional life as a Brewers writer.

I used the website Piktochart to create this infographic, and the first hour or so of my work on this was dedicating to playing around a bit with my options and trying to figure out how everything worked. There's a whole deeper world in this site's box of tools to explore that I didn't even begin to dig into, but I certainly plan to go back for more.

To save myself some time and headache, I started with one of the site's pre-made templates, this one was called "Coffee vs. Tea". I took out all the elements that referred to the two beverages, switched around some of the colors (it still has an overall earthy tone that I'm decided is the outfield grass, but really I just couldn't figure out how to adjust the background color), and got to work.

For explanation of what's all included here, the graph shows both team's league rankings in offense, pitching and defense, followed by the weekend's probable starting pitchers. Below those are the team's records, shown graphically. I think added a fun fact at the bottom, along with a source to credit baseball-reference.com.

I think this kind of activity has a lot of uses in the classroom. From one perspective, I can use this to create infographics to support my lessons that students will find interesting. Then of course, I can also have students create their own infographics to show what they have learned in an interesting and fun way.

Digital Storytelling -- Writing For the Internet Age

Today we're talking about the Digital Storytelling, in which one uses the full complement of media
types available to people today -- audio, video, photos and drawings, animations, text, etc. -- to convey meaning in a way that is a little more innovative and perhaps more interesting than simply using text.

I have some experience with satire and digital storytelling, though it's nothing too fancy as far as the technology used. I've used photo-editing software (very, very poorly) to make posts like this one, where I compared Disney princesses to Milwaukee Brewers players. I also did this extremely silly piece of investigative journalism that became entirely too real.

As far as other forms of media are concerned, I do not have much experience working with video much, or with multimedia forms of digital storytelling. I do have a podcast that I co-host and produce, but I'm not sure that necessarily qualifies as "digital storytelling."

Thinking back to my experiences consuming this form of media, I remember watching silly Flash videos like End of the World, playing around with Homestar Runner and other things of that nature back in elementary and middle school. Today, I personally prefer reading text to watching videos in general, but almost every news article begins with a video related to the story below it.

One of the more interesting ideas I saw in the examples of digital storytelling was the idea of interactive fiction. I've not played or seen Heavy Rain, but I have seen games and interactive movies like it, like the Walking Dead games. I'm not sure how one would incorporate these into the classroom -- the creation of something like that would probably involve a time commitment and level of expertise that is beyond the scope of a high school English course.

I do like the idea of using video to have students create their own public service announcements. This has a multi-layered ability to teach students: they'll be writing their own script and learning how to use tools to create and produce video. Perhaps most importantly, they'll be doing research on an important issue that they'll be able to dive into and not only learn some things about themselves, but teach others about it with their project.

Writing coaching: Living the Achievement Gap

My first experiences with coaching young writers has certainly been eye opening. Over the past year and a half since I've restarted my own educational journey as a Master's student at UW-Milwaukee, of course I've learn a lot about the theory of teaching English to students, about what to expect in the classroom, and about how I can best use my own expertise to assist students in becoming better readers and writers themselves. However, as is so often the case, there's is nothing quite like getting that hands-on experience.

The progression of the students I have worked with so far has turned out to be very much like turning on a video game for the first time. As we began working with students from Kohler High School, I was somewhat shocked to see the impressive level of skill from these young writers. Both students I worked with introduced themselves as freshmen, but when I read their essays, I felt very much like I was reading the work of freshmen in college, not high school. It was a joy because although I felt like I didn't have all that much to teach them to be perfectly honest, I found myself able to really focus in on some higher-order issues that they could work on, as well as being able to offer plenty of praise.

As the next waves of writers began to roll in, however, it became clear to be that the first round had merely been the game's tutorial, and now that I had pressed "OK" to acknowledge I understood the basics of game play, I was being fully thrown into the fire. While there were certainly positive things that I could see in the writing from the rest of the students I worked with, there were a number of mechanical issues that I felt I needed to help correct before I could even begin to attack the meatier issues of their content. The basics of punctuation usage, capitalization, singular/plural agreement and sentence structure were real problems throughout the essays of the rest of the students I worked with, in some places making it hard for me to even understand what the student was trying to say, which of course makes it difficult to engage students regarding higher-order concerns.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, the disparity between the students from Kohler High School and the other students I have worked with is another example of the black/white and urban/suburban achievement gaps. Kohler is a suburb of Sheboygan, which is itself a suburb of Milwaukee. It is populated with families of relatively high social-economic status, and is largely composed of white people. The other students I worked with were from the city of Milwaukee, many of them were students of color, and the areas they come from are substantially lower social-economic areas. I won't attack the causes of this issue in this post, or it's solutions -- that has been and will continue to be covered ad nauseum by those much smarter than me. But I hope that the work that I do with students can contribute to helping to close that gap.

The Writing Process

I tend to write in fragments -- not in sentence fragments, but rather fragmented paragraphs. Instead of
starting at the beginning with an introduction and then taking that through to the body paragraphs and a conclusion, I jump around the page, starting one paragraphs when an idea hits me and taking it as far is it goes, before jumping over to another thought. Sometimes I'll make notes for what a paragraph is going to be about, and sometimes I'll just leave a blank space to indicate that some sort of transition is needed still between one idea and another.

Oftentimes, I'll save the introduction for the very end -- I find it's easier sometimes to write an introduction to what I'm going to say after I've already said it. This happens more often when I'm not entirely sure where my writing is going to go, like when I'm writing for my blogs. In those cases, I'll often start with a topic or subject but not really be sure what I'm going to end up saying about it, so the introduction ends up writing itself once I've finished the body. When writing professionally or for school, I'm more prone to start with the introduction, which helps me focus my thoughts and gets me started.

I think that younger, novice writers tend to write fairly linearly. In general, that's how English teachers teach writing -- at least, that's how my teachers taught me when I was coming up through grade school and secondary school. I first learned the classic five-paragraph format; the introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion, in that order. Instead of bouncing around a piece and following whatever stray thoughts came into my head that might be useful, I focused on a very regimented order of what to write about. I think this can cause one's writing to suffer, because we don't necessarily come up with ideas in the order we want to -- if we don't follow a thought, we may never get it back again.

Of course, this style of writing contrasts with the model presented in the article by Flowers & Hayes, which talks about a more fluid style of writing in which the processes of generating ideas, "translating" and revising all happen in waves, rather than as separate actions. Many students dislike pre-writing activities -- and while I believe that a traditional outline can help in certain situations, I understand the frustration with breaking things down in that way. A more natural way to write is what's presented by Flowers and Hayes.

Writing Coach Profile

Hi! My name is Travis and I'm a graduate student at UW-Milwaukee. I am currently seeking certification as an English teacher while working toward a Master's degree in English Education. I graduated from UW-Whitewater in 2010 with a Bachelor's degree in English with a creative writing emphasis and a minor in journalism.

I'm a big sports fan, and I currently work as a Brewers writer for SB Nation and Baseball Prospectus. I also write for a sports and humor site called Crooked Scoreboard. In addition to being a Brewers and baseball fan, I love the Packers, Badgers, Bucks and Pittsburgh Penguins. I play kickball and volleyball with my friends as well.

Aside from my writing, I also work full time as a financial aid adviser at another university. Between working full time, writing part time at three different sites, and attending grad school part time, the answer to, "What do you do with your free time?" is, "What's free time?" If it theoretically existed, I would probably be reading (my favorite book is "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller), playing board games (my favorite game is Carcassonne) or video games (you would beat me at Call of Duty), watching TV shows (my favorite show right now is Masterchef Junior) and listening to music (my favorite acts are Run the Jewels, Taylor Swift and Brand New).

I look forward to working with you this semester!!

My history with blogging

I have a fairly extensive history working with social media and creating digital content. I've been on Twitter since 2011, I didn't start using it in earnest until 2014.
using Facebook socially since I was an undergraduate freshman in 2005, and though I've owned an account on

As far as blogging is concerned, I'm a very active blogger. I had been writing my own blog since around 2013 or so, but haven't kept it up much lately, with a notable exception last month. Last summer, I was brought in as an intern to write for a new local branch of Baseball Prospectus, to which I contribute a weekly column.This opportunity launched me into being hired as a staff writer at Brew Crew Ball, the Brewers blog that is part of the SB Nation network of sports blogs. You can find my author page here.

Through my blogging and, by extension, through my use of Twitter to engage with readers, fans and other writers, I have been able to become a part of a nationwide community of baseball fans that includes some of the most influential voices in baseball media. I have been interviewed for pieces being written at other sites like Beyond the Box Score and Purple Row, and I have been invited to join the staff at sports and humor blog, Crooked Scoreboard. I recently recorded the first episode of a podcast with two other writers, one a Beyond the Box Score columnist living in New Jersey and the other a Baseball Prospectus writer in Boston by way of Chicago. Through my use of digital content and social media, I have opened up myself to a world of opportunities to advance my hobby/second career.

Given the experience I have had, I would say one of the greatest potential benefits to digital content creation is the opportunity to expand your network and to create opportunities for yourself in your social life and in your career. In our digital age, the ability to have a record of the things you've created will almost serve as a resume for people. In the Jenkins article we read today, he spoke of promoting a "participatory culture" -- one with low barriers to creating and sharing content, a high amount of support and social interactivity, and one in which all feel free to share and collaborate, even if they do not actively participate.

Of course, one of the pitfalls to having that permanent record of your online creations is that when you create something that is inappropriate or offensive, it doesn't go away, no matter how hard you try. That's why another part of the participatory culture in Jenkins article, the presence of a mentor to guide younger users, is important. It is vitally important for students to understand that the things they create and share with the public become can permanent very, very quickly. An example of this is this article about cyberbullying, posted by my friend Nic at Sports Illustrated's The Cauldron. Here, thre are several examples of very nasty tweets directed at women sportswriters that have since been deleted, but are not immortalized in a very public way through screenshots. Should any potential future employer stumble upon these, it would be very difficult for these young people to find and keep a position.