Week+Five+Reflections

**Course Reflection Prompts** Respond to the following questions on your wiki. // 1. What outcomes had you envisioned for this course? Did you achieve those outcomes? Did the actual course outcomes align with those that you envisioned? //
 * Final Assessment: Course Reflections  **

Teachers at each gradelevel at my school are taking on an active approach to integrating technology into their classrooms. With wiki's, blogs, personal websites class video's etc. there is a new calling for what we can achieve from working together. My goal from this course was to get the HANDS ON experience needed to be able to go back and use not only the items that I am learning about with the students but to also help teach those who are "digital immigrants" as well. I want each person in my building to feel as thought they can offer the same type of technology integration with their students as those who work with it on a daily basis. I was able to get that hands on experience that I needed to be able to implement this at a staff development on my campus and feel as though I have the knowledge necessary to take it to the next level. What I expected was what I recieved from this course and I am hoping to use this as a sprinboard for other projects.

2. To the extent that you achieved the outcomes, are they still relevant to the work that you do in your school? Why or why not?

At my school we really strive to find new ways to let everyone on our staff share some sort of professional development during the school year. I am excited to say that I am looking forward to presenting this to the rest of my satff in the coming school year as part of our proffessional growth in the area of technology. Each spring, before the end of the school year, we talk about our goals as a campus...a review of what they are, did we achieve them, why or why not, do we have any other areas that we would like to focus on? Technology seemed to tbe the area that each one of our staff members wanted more training, teaching and use in the classroom. Therefore, I will be doing a staff development on some of the exciting things that we have learned in our classes as well as working on starting some Project Based Learning sites and teams throughout the district. This will allow teachers to be able to get the hands on experiences that they need to feel more confident and proud of the technology that they can use and how to incorporate it into their classrooms.

3. What outcomes did you not achieve? What prevented you from achieving them?

With time constraints with this class only being five weeks, I would have liked to have gone a little deeper into what we learned about. Using all the multimedia hardware and software was a great expeirence and I enjoyed working within my group. With the four of us though, I felt as thought I could have done more and I wish that I had had the opportunity to do more of the editing in our final PSA only to get more experience with the program. My group worked well together and each one presented such strengths, but I think if I had had an opportunity to do another video on my own (as in week two) that the extra experience may have been an additional bonus! I also felt that due to some of the schedules of group members (vacations, myself included) and the holiday intermingled wth this particular course that it was difficult to communicate and we ran close to the deadline waiting for all the pieces to be connected. I would have liked some extra time to tweak the final product but had to work with time constraints. I feel as though I would have been more successful in this class had I taken it during the school year and one of the individual courses during the summer months.

4. Were you successful in completing the course assignments? If not, what prevented or discouraged you?

I was able to complete all the course assignments although I was incredibly frustrated by week two. In fact I sent an SOS to Daphne and posted a question on the discussion board because I was having trouble taking video from the internet and downlaoding it into a workabkle software program. I had only worked with bits and pieces of some of this before and only in the tight grips of my own technology facilitator on campus so I had not "done" much of it myself. After finding a program that let me download to work with the clips I found it a very simplistic project but the hours that I took trying to get started was frustrating. Lots of trial and error and then will it work questioning! I was able to turn in all on time and even for the final PSA after numerous emails were not going through wth clips for our final project, I posted them on YouTube to be downloaded elsewhere.

5. What did you learn from this course: about yourself, your technology and leadership skills, and your attitudes?

As stated in several other pieces turned in for this week, I love that instant gratification and I have had to really change my learning style when it comes to that with online courses, especially this one. I love sitting across from someone and brainstorming to see if they like my idaes or we need to go a different direction. It was difficult while doing this interactively on the wiki, we had to wait hours, even days to get any feedback on ideas, directions and production. I also learned that at times I need to just step away from the computer. As I stated in Q #4, I was very frustrated in Week #2 and looking back, if I had just taken a break and left the computer for an hour or two and then returnedm, that I may have been less overwhelmed with the project at hand. I also have a tendency to take over in a group setting. I really tried to step back on this one and just fall in line. Each one of my group members brought so much to the table and oare in graduate school because they want to be that it brings a whole new set of players to the table. I found I didn't have to be bossy to get things done, we were all just as motivated!