My 8th Semester

Wow I have completed eight semesters or 40 classes. That is a lot of time spent in university and learning. In my past university experience I had to reflect on everything – education classes that is. Why is it now that I actually want to reflect? Why could I not go to sleep because I wanted to write this post while it was still fresh in mind? I tend to think when I lay down to go to bed. I am horrible for it and it takes me forever to fall asleep some days. The thoughts keep running through my head – what I learned, what I have to do or how I feel about a certain subject.

Throughout my internship, I really didn’t want to come back to university. But once I was at the end of my internship I wanted to come back to the university. I wanted to learn something, anything. I learned tons in my internship but I wanted to start thinking at a higher level – not grade 5. As a future teacher, my class was awesome in helping me explore myself and my confidence. Now I was back at the university and I wanted to be on top of everything – all my reading, responses, projects and posts on Moodle. I was very determined for this goal but eventually my days didn’t have enough hours and I found myself not keeping up with everything. However in the end I real did surprise myself. I had a couple projects that were supposed to be collaboration but I ended up doing them alone. Sometimes I spent so much time worrying that once I had done it, I just shook my head. Why was I so scared? Why did I not think I could do it? I don’t give myself enough credit and I think I can’t do an assignment because it is hard and I don’t know what to do or how. For me, this last full semester was all about finding myself and finding what I believed in. I registered for classes I thought I would enjoy and learn from.

EMTH – Originally I wasn’t registered for this class but with the misunderstanding of ECMP actually being on Wednesday, made me change my whole schedule around. This class focused on some math topics but we talked lots about social justice issues. This class often touched on other classes because many of my classes dealt with society and what is happening around us. I think this gave me some insight into life as an educator.

RLST – I needed to upgrade an elective and I chose a class on the Hebrew Bible. I am not that religious of a person but this class was quite interesting. Again, it was neat to see the issues in the Bible relate to other classes I was taking. Our prof made class interesting and he embraced the small class environment. I realized I really did need to explore the Bible. I had to write a comparative essay on the sacrifice of Isaac. I was scared but when I got the assignment back I did pretty well. I was on the right track and dug into all my commentaries and resources to produce a diverse paper. See, I really suprised myself there! My final essay was again a comparative essay between Genesis 6 and the novel, Many Waters. I struggled with this but technology actually helped me. I needed some ideas for my specific focus and where I wanted to go with the essay. Out of curiosity I went on Twitter and asked “Anyone religious and want to give me an essay topic dealing with Genesis 6?” I received a direct message from a math teacher in Garner, NC. He had read the novel and new his Old Testament. He gave me some ideas which was great because he was the only person that had read both parts. I had asked others for help and tried to explain the novel in two minutes but he was the only one who knew exactly what I was talking about. If you ever read this – Thanks so much! Who knew my social networking would benefit me in my RLST class? I didn’t…I was very suprised to get a reply. I sure am glad I thought to use Twitter in this time of frustration.

EFDN – Well I loved this class. If you know me, you definitely know that. At first the class was intimidating but I thought I would stick with it – I hated having to mess with my schedule since I had to switch so many classes already in my first week. But I sure am glad I stuck around for this class. Not only did I meet some awesome people, who I would have never met otherwise but it made me open my mind. Each week we talked about another issue in society that dealt with education. We talked about residential schooling, gender, masculinity, femininity, heterosexism, social class, bodies, bullying, disabilities and many other topics. Each article dealt with the effects it had in schools and schooling. Each week we explored an issue. I would say I am a shy person especially when I learn with peers but this class made me speak. I wanted to share my thoughts on articles and I wanted to make points that others hadn’t brought up. I really allowed myself to grow. As a future educator, these topics open your eyes. Some teachers don’t think about all the issues that surround schooling in society. But now I can acknowledge those issues and have some insight because I have explored the topics. This class almost makes me want to come back and do a masters on one of the issues.

EPSY – This class opened my eyes to children with learning disabilities and disorders. I really wish I had the chance to take this class before my internship because I would have understood some students better. I was given strategies and I was also able to learn from others. We posted each week on specific topics and reading what others wrote gave me many AHA moments. The prof also told us about the students she works with and it  showed the reality of working with children with special needs. We also had guest speakers and they talked to us from a different standpoint. We had visits from a doctor, a student, a mother, another special education teacher and a speech and language pathologist. If I have to make a plan for a student with a disability or disorder – I knew who would be part of my team. Remember: “A child is a child before they are a disability/disorder.” We also had a chance to talk about this issue in my EFDN class and I had a better idea of the topic then I would have had without this class.

ECMP – Well I already reflected about this class.

Okay, just because I wrote more about one class then the other…it doesn’t mean I liked it better. Each of these classes expanded my “worldview” and my “knowledge.” I can thank each of these classes, and ECMP also, for helping prepare me to teach! Thanks.

Now I think my brain won’t be churning because I got all this information out of my head!

Last Class

Tonight was our last ECMP 455 class and I won’t lie I didn’t really want to go since tomorrow is the last day of classes and I just wanted to relax. But I am glad I did go. I got to see a different side to everyone – especially the 355 class. I think that same sort of idea would be neat at the beginning of the year to get to know everyone. Like “what are you afraid of” and then a “what did you learn.” Even though many of use had the same ideas and slides…we expressed them differently. Out of all the presentation I have done this semester, that was the only one I was 100% comfortable doing because it was all about my learning and what I know now. I ended my Pecha Kucha with blogging. All through university our education profs got us to reflect, reflect our hearts out! One thing about that was only one person got to read it and you never had a chance to grow from feedback or “discussion.” Blogging is out there – meaning anyone can give feedback and anyone help you grow. I find that blogging is all about your thoughts and freedom of reflecting. I think this last reflection class really gave me an idea of how amazing blogs can be. A friend of mine, Jackie, talked about how she was getting awesome feedback from her blog. She talked about how other educators want to talk about her with their class and that is pretty neat. Which gives me hope. Without feedback and hits on your blog it is kinda depressing to post at times. Now that I have place to say, “Hey read my blog,” on Twitter – someone will actually read it. A couple summers ago I tried to blog in the summer but no one ever read it so it was meaningless. Now I have a social network who will follow me and give me feedback – I like the future

P.S. I liked Robin’s idea of a daily photo…so I think I may try it…stay tuned.

Comic from www.gapingvoid.com

ECMP 455 Reflection

ECMP 455 has shown me many new ways to use technology. I will admit I was scared at first. I had taken ECMP 355 two years ago and I hadn’t really learned much more since that class. In this class I have tried many new things: Elluminate, Google Apps, Twitter, Delicious, Wikis, Videos, Mentorship, Social Networking, SecondLife and Digital Storytelling to name a few. In this class I was given many tools to use and play around with and see how they worked for me. Throughout this semester I have built a social network for myself that I use from a professional standpoint. When I had any technology based questions I knew who to ask. I may have not personally known many of them but they were always willing to help. Also the guest speakers who came to our Elluminate sessions every week would teach me something new about a certain aspect of technology. My final project was on Digital Storytelling, but it wasn’t until Allan came to talk about and share his own Wiki, that I really understood what it was about. We were also shown other helpful tools on the internet and what we could use them for (many are listed above).

Some barriers I encountered dealt with the use of my own time. I found that ECMP was times left out of my schedule because I had some much reading to do this semester and I actually kept up with it. My blogging and playing around with all the new technology, tools and ideas we were given was stronger in the beginning then towards the end. Toward the end of the semester I found that all my time was spent writing essays and doing projects. I guess the meeting from my home sometimes got mistaken for my weekly duties.

How have I met the course objectives? Well I created this blogfolio to blog and to also share some of things of have done and created in the past. It is definitely a starting place for me to build on as I beginning teaching. I have also kept a Google Doc for my documented the work I have done throughout this semester. I chose Google Docs because it was a new tool I learned about – even if it was similar to Microsoft Word – but I was able to work on it from any computer and I can share it with my prof.

I thought the mentorship was a wonderful idea. It gave us a chance to work with another classroom somewhere in the world. I was very excited to be part of it. However, my mentorship may have not been as successful as some others. One of the classes I was working with was great except we had limited times to meet. We only got to meet once but we actually has to opportunity to interact with the class via Skype. The class was working on a genetics unit and we read them a story about twins separated at birth. This was a positive experience even though we did only connect a couple times. This teacher also mentioned that when he signed up for the mentorship, he thought we would actually be going into his classroom – so I guess that changed the perspective of the experience when he found out it was all online. The other class I was with was harder to connect with. I had tried a couple things and every time I did there wasn’t any feedback from the class – however these were very young students. I had to initiate everything and I often didn’t hear much back but at least I tried. I had a good experience and a not as good experience; at least I had the opportunity of both.

For my final project we made a Wiki for Digital Storytelling and I worked with Sheri on this project. I had been invited to wiki’s in the past but I had never done much editing or creating. It was a new process at the beginning and the more time I worked with it the better I got. Sheri created it so she had extra options then I had and I spent some time trying to change the colour scheme and then realized she was the only allowed to do it. It was something I eventually learned about. I did some research on digital storytelling and I was amazed by all the resources that are out there. It was neat to organize what I found and hopefully another teacher will use them. We also worked with another teacher and her class. They made digital storyboards and created picture. Then we recorded their voices reading the stories and added the pictures to them afterward. Since I created an Intro Video at the beginning of the year I had gained some video making skill with Windows Movie Maker but we recorded our audio with the kids on Mac laptops. This meant we had to create our digital stories with iMovie. Since it was new to me, it was a bit frustrating. We went in thinking it couldn’t take that long to make a couple videos….well we were wrong. But now I’m pretty good with iMovie. We both added things to the wiki throughout and we each had jobs. It was neat to collaborate on a project and only meet a couple times. The link to our wiki is: http://dstecmp455.wikispaces.com