Personal Learning Reflection

                In my Personal Growth Plan, I expressed a basic desire to advance my knowledge in technologies and skills to promote myself in the higher educational support field. In the context of this course, I have been able to experience new technologies, new methods of collaboration and opportunities to continue to work on my writing both educationally and personally. I feel that these experiences have ultimately furthered my ambitions for this course.            

                Most of the content pertaining to teaching, instructional design and learning styles was a useful first exposure. I had taken an integrated science for education majors’ course, but that class focused less on learning styles verse age groups, mainly focusing on younger students. Lesson content was not a new concept to me, my mother was a teacher, I grew up watching her draft lesson plans. But the way to create lesson plans to be effective and efficient is something I had previously ignored. I think a different view of this experience is how I applied education to my use of technology, which was in truth a hope of mine.

                As a technologist and not an educator (at least not right now), my evaluation of "good teaching with technology" are about my personal experience in this course. Even though I did not really turn in the “learning” assignments, I did find the lectures particularly interesting in how they were seemingly a collaborative effort. I noticed that some of the authors of the lectures were written by different instructors. I thought this was a great method of “mixing up” the lectures providing new and different approaches to the online lecturing experience. The group assignment was a good opportunity to experience some new communication technologies. We tried a couple systems and ended up Skyping to hash out our idea, and a wiki to put it together, it seemed “seamless” and very efficient.  Another group of assignments I felt helped me reach my intentions with this course are the personal writing opportunities such as blogs and reflections.

                Another interesting aspect was some personal and professional experiences that have worked to further my educational goals. The timing of my encouragement to familiarize myself with web 2.0 content has exposed me to information that I have found very interesting (outside side of education) and also allowed me the opportunity to start writing on content which motivated me to express myself in writing in an extracurricular activity (a contribution to local news). Also during this course I had a couple interviews and in after review of my professional goals, it was made clear that I would be expected to have experience teaching, if I want to aspire to management in higher education.

                 In reflection and establishing new goals, I found I will want to continue to work on my current goals; they were set with long terms in mind, but added to them are two goals. One is to pursue opportunities to practice my writing in motivated venue, whether class assignment, personal blogging, or opportunities at work. The other new goal is to further my opportunities to be an educator, which may involve pursuing a teaching certificate.