Kala Jo Grice
IT 648 Class Reflection
What learned
I truly believe this class has taught me more useful things than any of my other graduate classes have. I have learned a lot more about gmail accounts than I had ever known before. This will help me in my classes as well. Since my school allows us to access gmail, I will suggest to my students that they create gmail accounts this year for their required email account. I will try out the blogging in my classroom and see how it goes with the junior high school students. I never knew all the possibilities with blogging either. I always thought it was just like a journal where all you did was write stuff. I never knew it could have attachments and links to other sites within it. I liked getting to choose my layout too. I did not like the chat capabilities in gmail. They ended up being too complicated to figure out. It was not very user friendly which is a must with the age I teach.
I also learned a lot more about the live classroom than I had ever used before. I found it to be VERY beneficial. I plan to use this more in my classroom and try to use my EEF money to buy a webcam for my teacher computer. I think my students will enjoy that more than just being able to hear each other.
I also learned about NVU. I had never used it before. I have created many websites in the past but NVU was a new software program for me. I struggled a lot in the beginning but after going through the tutorial, I understood it a lot more. However, I do not believe I will use this in my classroom since Dreamweaver is a required curriculum objective.
I also learned about a LOT of Web 2.0 software tools. I plan to study these more in depth in the future and try to include some in my classes.
Weak points
My weak points this in this class was making myself blog and respond to other blogs. I have never been a fan of everyone knowing how I truly feel about things, and therefore, this was a tremendously hard assignment for me. I do not have the personality to explain in detail everything I think and do while creating an assignment. I feel it is a tiresome and boring thing. I can see how others could benefit from it though and I do understand its purpose.
I also struggled with NVU. I am so used to more advanced web creation software that it was hard for me to use NVU. I did like some of the sites the tutorial sent us to where we could create our logos and banners and such. That was fun.
Strong points
My strong points were a little unfair to my classmates. Since I teach a brand new, up to date technology class, I have used a lot of the technologies that we used in this classroom. I came in to the assignments already having a huge advantage and this allowed my group to excel rather quickly. I catch on pretty fast to new technologies also. This has always been a plus for me.
Interaction with peers
I LOVED!!!!!! My group. They were WONDERFUL. We all learned from each other and worked at a great pace. Since I hate to procrastinate, we worked well together. Our group got together on line every Tuesday night for about four weeks and got a LOT accomplished. Even after we were done with our group assignments, we would get on and help each other out.
As for the discussion board interaction, I was a little depressed. I was usually the first to post and rarely got responses. I guess a lot of people are like me and only respond to the people who post around the time they do.
Interaction with instructor
I was glad that Dr. Wang posted to my blogs because towards the end, it was a little sad. Only one member would tend to respond. I was grateful that Dr. Wang responded to most of the questions I sent her in emails. There was one time when I blogged, emailed and put in the discussion board an issue I was having and no one responded with how to settle the issue. I eventually called my mom and her and I tried to figure it out. Dr. Wang was great about keeping me up to date on my grade as well. Every time I sent something in to be graded, she got me my grade in a timely manner. She was also helpful in helping me correct my mistakes which is a wonderful learning tool in and of itself. Thanks Dr. Wang!
Communication devices
Of all the communication devices we used in this class, I cannot answer which one I used the most because I used a lot of them a lot of the time. For group work, we used the live classroom because we found it the most beneficial for us. We could see each other, hear each other and not have to type all of our chats. This was what worked best for us. The only disadvantage I saw with it was sometimes the videos would lag and also not everyone can afford all of the equipment needed to be able to get the full advantages of the software, for example, a webcam and a microphone.
In the class, I used the discussion board all the time to post my discussions and my responses to my classmates. It was also used to ask some of the help questions I had. The discussion board was an advantage because the questions posed made us think and reflect before we responded. The only disadvantage was sometimes they would get lengthy because there were so many questions in one discussion. I do not like to open a discussion thread and see it take up the entire page. It makes me not want to read it.
I also blogged after every assignment I completed. I went on daily and responded to any new blogs that my group members had posted also. The blogging had an advantage because it did make me reflect on what I had done. However, this was also a disadvantage for me because again I am private and do not like to discuss these kinds of things in detail where anyone can read them.
Email was used in gmail between my group members to send drafts of our projects to each other. This was an advantage to us because no other group could see it like if we had to use the discussion board. I did not really see any disadvantages of the email.
The chat room was not used more than the one time we tried it as a group. Advantage was you did not need any extra equipment. However, the big disadvantage was it was too hard to follow any of the conversations. I kept getting lost in the discussion.
The voice board was okay. I can see how it would be REALLY useful in a college class because you could send an announcement to the student’s email account and they would not have to log into blackboard to get it. However, it is just not needed in my classroom. My home page is a built in announcement page and the students are required to read the announcement to find their daily assignments. I guess I could use it for any students who have problems reading. I could offer the announcements in two locations. That is a pretty good idea. I might just try to do that.
Helpfulness of group work and why
I enjoyed getting the different perspectives from my group members because it made me think of possible benefits and problems that the technology might cause my own students. My group worked wonderfully together and I got a lot from them because of this. You cannot evaluate communication devices without someone to communicate with and having the same group for all of the evaluations was helpful because you already knew their technological history.
Suggestions
The only suggestion I would make is to maybe split the discussion questions and try to not have so much to type in one response. It makes it hard to make yourself log on and read all of that so you can respond to others.
