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