Reflections on EDLD 5306

This was my first graduate level course and my first online course to participate in as a student.  My true goal coming into this course was to find out if I could manage taking an online course to begin earning my master’s degree while juggling the rest of my life.  I also wanted to see if taking graduate classes would help me improve at my job.  After ten years in instructional technology I wanted to learn more and be challenged in my understanding about technology in school.  This course did challenge me and my knowledge of technology.  The focus on the national standards, copy right issues, and ethical concerns were topics that I had not had much exposure to on a formal level but needed to know more about in order to be able to speak to them at the campus level.   I also learned that I am able to complete course work and still keep my sanity.

As the face of technology on my campus I found the information presented in the class was very useful to what I do every day on campus.   The opportunity to examine the newly adopted Technology Application TEKS for 6-8 grade, as well as the national technology plan, has given me an outline for what I need to do next year to get the campus ready to implement these TEKS into the core curriculum areas.  I also found the readings and discussions on the digital-age issues to be very eye-opening and plan to have the campus technology team look at those topics and make plans to address them on campus.   I was challenged to check into how we are teaching students to be safe online as well as how we are teaching them to be digitally literate.  Overall I felt like all of the class content could be applied to my job and found it very helpful.  

I really feel like I have achieved most if not all of the outcomes so far.   I still have questions about the internship experience and feel like that was a tacked on part of the assignment of week 5.   I would have like there to be a little more explanation to the process as well as clear instructions on what paperwork would be required for the process.  I am hoping that when we get assigned the internship supervisor that those questions will be answered with a little more clarity and focus. The web conferences did help in answering some of those questions, but I found them to be awkward at times when the audio had issues or the conversation was dominated by questions that might have been better dealt with in a one-to-one situation.  I do plan to use the week before the second class to read the field experience manual and get a little more information.

I was successful in completing the assignments on time each week.   Week one was overwhelming when I opened up the assignment document and saw it was 33 pages long.    I seriously considered dropping the course and walking away from graduate school after the first 2 days of trying to tackle the information.  Attending the web conference that week helped ease my fear as Ms. Cummings did her best to reassure all of us that this week was tough and that she was there to help us be successful.  I was also able to contact the class assistant and receive clarification on anything I had questions about.  Once I learned to pace myself throughout the week the work seemed manageable until week 5, when the directions seemed to be harder to follow.  Finding people who had already completed some of the assignments and seeing how they tackled the work helped tremendously as well.  After finishing the last week’s worth of work, I have a feeling of great accomplishment at completing my first graduate class.

I have learned that I am able to take graduate classes, work full time and be a mom without wanting to hurt too many people.  I appreciated the course work as it made me think about technology in schools from a different point of view.   I discovered that although I have been pushing the use of web 2.0 technologies, I have missed some of the basics in ensuring that students know how to find information and test it validity online as well as how to be safe.  I have had my passion for using technology in schools renewed as I thought more about the way 21^st century students learn and interact with their environment.  I am very fortunate to work in the district that I do and have the opportunity to help teachers understand best practices when integrating technology and not leave them feeling abandoned to figure this out by themselves.  This course gave me a stronger background to work with those teachers and I look forward to applying this information in the coming school year.