This was the first course that I completed for this program. It was a good course to start with because I was able to combine something new, Adobe Captivate, with something I already knew, MS PowerPoint.
The webinars class was probably the most important one for my career. I have to lead synchronous sessions when I teach at K12. This class taught me ways to keep students engaged through hands on activities, demonstrations, videos, and examples.
This course seemed to combine what I had learned in my first two courses into something new. I used Animoto (which was the tool we taught about in our webinar) to teach about Project Based Learning. PBL has always been an interest of mine and I liked to learn more about it with this project. This was also a much more robust Animoto than I had ever done before.
This course was really fun for me. For my change report I went into my son's preschool classroom and read the kids stories with the iPad. I loved seeing the kids be excited about reading. They were motivated to read more and be involved in the stories. This project led me to want to write children's stories of my own which has been a huge focus of my efforts lately.
This was probably my favorite project that I completed for this program. I was able to design my artist's statement in any way that I chose as the final project. At that time in my life I was pregnant with my daughter, who is now almost 2. I cry every time I watch it! The project that I have linked on the image is a much more robust project, but it is not as much of my heart in it. The design document for that project is important because it explains what I was thinking in the design.
I learned a lot about social media and web presence in this course. My final paper showcases my thoughts on what I had accomplished and where I was headed. My goals have changed now and it is only a year and a half later. I have a book that is being published so I will need to use everything I learned in this class very soon!
This class was absolutely not what I expected. I thought we would be creating a game since we had been creating things in every previous course. However, in this course, we played and analyzed games. I was exposed to a bunch of new games this way, but I think I would have preferred to design my own educational game.
This was my hardest class in this whole program. I had a lot going on in my personal life and I struggled to have any motivation. I did complete all of the required work, my heart just wasn't in it. I enjoyed reading some of the articles and performing the research for my team.
I enjoyed this class. I liked the structure of it because I knew what I needed to turn in and when it was due. It was a lot of work though. There were a whole bunch of due dates to pay attention to. I have linked the final portfolio here so that you can see where I started with each assignment type and where I ended. I feel like I grew and was able to complete the assignments more successfully.
Besides the webinar class, this class was probably the most important for my current career. I was dreading doing this class because I thought it would be a huge undertaking. Creating a course from scratch sounded like a heck of a lot of work! However, the teachers made it very easy to stay on track and create it from the ground up. They also provided very good feedback for the project. I love how it turned out!
These are my reflections as I look back on this program. I've really learned a lot and grown as both a student and an educator. I look forward to what the future holds!