It is always interesting looking back at the end of the semester to see how far we have come and how much we have learned. As I re-read my Flight path from the beginning of the semester I didn’t really notice much change for me there. I am, however, also in a bit of a unique situation where I am on a maternity leave at the moment and do not go back to work for a few more weeks. There are many things that I have learned about and thought about trying in my classroom that I haven’t been able to do yet because I am not currently there. That being said, through the creation of my content module I was reminded of the fact that I need to remain open and flexible both in my design and when actually teaching lessons in the classroom.
This course has allowed me to sharpen my WordPress skills, as these had gotten somewhat rusty after being out of the classroom for nearly a year. It also made me think critically about the design of many of my units and where I will need to spend more time working on a design that is more effective for my students and my teaching practice. From this course, I come away with many ideas that I will implement into my classroom. One of my favourite new tools was discovered just a few weeks ago when we were working on our digital stories. I discovered EdPuzzle and this is something that I will be using in my classroom a whole lot. I love that I can access videos from sources like YouTube, shorten them to show only the parts I want, and insert questions that students will answer. I can see how this would be useful when I use elements of the flipped classroom when I teach math, and I also see this tool being very useful in engaging students in Social Studies lessons as well.
In terms of the quality of education received throughout this course, I believe that it is quite high and on par with the other courses I have completed thus far in my MET journey. I enjoyed the fact that the readings were not all academic journal based and that many of the assigned readings came from blogs or online magazines. I thought they were current and relevant which is important when we are discussing technology. Furthermore I found the discussion themes and questions to be engaging and thought provoking for the most part. What I found frustrating at times was the lack of discussion at the beginning of the week. I have schedule constrains meaning that I was only available to log into the course on certain days, all of which were at the beginning of the week and feel that I may have missed out on some of the great discussion that seemed to happen towards the end of the week. By the time Monday came around and I was able to login again the discussion would have moved on to the next week.
In terms of assignments I really liked the fact that there was a great degree of choice. Not only was there choice of topics but there was also choice in terms of how we felt we worked best. I like that I wasn’t forced to work in a specific group for the majority of the assignments but that if I had wanted to work with a peer on Assignments 2 and 3 I would have had that option. Both of the larger assignments for this course have caused me to think about course design and revaluate some of the units that I teach, thinking about where I may need to revamp some ideas, where I need to add technology and where I need to start over. These two assignments challenged my thinking and at times caused me great frustration in working with technology and sometimes not having the technology cooperate in ways I felt it should. In all, I believe these assignments and the lessons I learned in the process of completing them were not only beneficial to me in the MET journey, but were also beneficial to me professionally.
What I particularly appreciated with this course was the fact that it wasn’t all based in Blackboard, a platform that I find is sluggish on my mobile devices where I frequently access my courses. I enjoyed the simplicity of the design that the WordPress site brought, yet really appreciated the password protected aspect of discussions and the dropbox feature for our assignment submission. I am currently taking another course that is completely based in WordPress, and even though I do enjoy the layout of that course as well, there is something about the mixed mediums of this one that I enjoy more.