The First Year Chronicles site is a blogging site where students from three of SUNY Geneseo’s first-year introduction to college writing classes wrote one or more self-reflective blog posts that focus on their first years at Geneseo. The site includes a Welcome page that features the most recent posts, a link to all of the posts, and a PDF of the complete posts for download. There is also a dropdown menu of resources for students to review while participating in the project.
This project was inspired by a brainstorming meeting of the New Student Connections and Success subcommittee of the SUNY Geneseo Provost’s Wildly Important Goal initiative. The ask was to create “a space where selected first-year students can write reflectively and publicly about their first-year experience at Geneseo, including challenges they were facing and how they were meeting those challenges.” The Center for Digital Learning (CDL) at Geneseo took on creating a public-facing website to address this ask.
Three first-year writing classes participated. Each class was taught by a different professor at Geneseo— two English faculty and one Theater faculty— with slightly different approaches to the project. While one class’s reflections were prompted to align with the course’s required readings, another encouraged students to take a more free-flowing approach, and another incorporated peer editing to prep posts for publication.
The CDL decided to host this website on Geneseo’s OpenLab instance, an open source WordPress multisite software. This multisite had been set up beforehand, so creating a child site for the First Year Chronicles project was quite straight forward.
The theme for this site is Zeko Lite. There are minimal plugins used on this site, primarily the WPForms Lite on the contact page.
