Welcome aboard, Compquistadors!

Greetings, AP Composition students!

Congratulations on taking part in the heroic quest known as “AP Composition and Language.” Your journey will be long, frequently arduous, oftentimes irreverent, and—hopefully—ultimately rewarding. I’m glad you’re with us!

Bear with me as I lay a lengthy, slight pedantic opening blog post on you. Your blogs, when you create them, will contain posts much more creative and streamlined then this behemoth salvo. This post, however, will give you everything you need to fulfill the summer coursework requirements for AP Composition.

Introduction
In order to complete your summer work, you will create and maintain a blog. This will allow you to respond to the summer readings as well as interact with the other students are enrolled in AP Composition. My hope this will be an interesting and interactive way to complete the summer work requirements. We will continue the blogs into the school year. There's a document on my teacher webpage called "You and Your Blog" that will have everything you need for blogging. I put a couple of the highlights below.

What's a blog?
Blogs, or more formally, a web logs, are online spaces for people ("bloggers") to share their writing on issues of importance to them. There are thousands and thousands of blogs out there in cyberspace, dealing with pretty much any subject matter you can think of. One benefits of blogging is that you automatically have a space for publishing your thoughts and, at least in theory, a built-in audience.

You may want to check out some blogs that people have created for my classes. Here are two that were particularly well-written. Both were created for my AP Composition class last year.

* Ciara’s blog
* Erin's blog

In both of these blogs, you'll see the following features: Complete, thoughtfully composed sentences, which avoid spelling and mechanical errors, a variety of ways in which the bloggers approach the readings, use of hypertext links and multi-media, and comments from others in the AP Comp classes.

Where do I get more info and the readings for the summer coursework?
All the documents you need for the summer coursework can be found on my AP Comp teacher webpage through the high school home page. Go to the "teacher web page" link under the "For MHS Students" tab. Once at the class resources page, drag down and click on my name, and you'll see the AP Composition homepage, which has many helpful documents, including summer work instructions and all the summer reading.

Start by opening the document entitled "Overview" on my teacher web page. This will give you detailed expectations and due dates. You will find all other needed documents, including the readings, on my teacher webpage.

How do I start my own blog?
This is the fun part. Begin by going to blogger.com and click on the "Create Your Blog Now" tab. Follow the directions and you'll soon have a functioning blog. Play around with design and layout, experimenting with what you can do with your blog.

Once you have your blog up and running, comment to this post letting me know, so I can put together a class list of blog addresses.

Good luck, have fun, and enjoy a productive and rewarding summer. I look forward to learning with you!