Ashley Pence
December 11, 2007
“What knowledge and skills have I acquired as a result of participating in this course?”
“O gallant Piglet!” This seemed like an appropriate place to begin my cover letter for my E-Portfolio. Some may ask why but as Mrs. McComas reads this i’m sure she will giggle a little, maybe even out loud because she knows it comes directly from her syllabus. For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about it comes from the all knowing, wonderful little bear named Pooh. “When in doubt, keep in mind that “O gallant Piglet” is always a very thoughtful way of beginning a piece of poetry.” Although this cover letter is nowhere near being a poem, it still seems fitting. I actually didn’t know how to start this letter because there are so many things that I have learned this semester through many different means. That quote from Pooh actually made me realize that my CD 315 class objectives had been accomplished. Even when I don’t know where to start I can still remember that there is something beyond that first train of thought that develops into something great and a result of what I have learned.
To foster in my students a love of learning…
Many times this semseter I would look at the course work for the week and mumble and groan about all that I had to do and how little time I had to do it in. This remained true even until this cover letter I’m not saying that I am any happier about it, but to realize that I have enjoyed learning and applying what i’ve learned is now evident. My first realization of loving to learn was with our online class with Katie McComas. It was very evident that the entire class was excited because you couldn’t get any of us to shut up. We all had questions for Katie and would not stop at just one simple question. We had to go deeper with the first question and add onto it. This eventually ended with us running out of time and i’m not even sure if everyone was able to ask their question. Nonetheless I had an awesome time and realized that it is very helpful to talk to someone who has been through the same things we are going through (recently). The way in which we communicated with her through the online chat made the conversation relaxed and free flowing. When this class discussion was over I realized how “geeky” we all are because we actually want to know the information that Katie had to tell us. When it was time for the conversation to end I was a little sad and hoped that we could do it again.
Cultivate a culture of inquiry as a means of knowing and sensemaking…
I can without a doubt say that this course revealed to me a whole new way of gathering information in more ways than one. I discovered a plethora of new forms of research in order to obtain knowledge as well as sensemaking of whatever it was we were working on for the course. I accomplished the majority of this objective during the second week of class by reading many articles as well as a chapter in our book. I evidence this by the declarative knowledge section of my week 2 participation memo.
“This week began with reading about the things I should know about blogs. I learned when, where and why to use them and also the positive and negative effects they can have. The only negative being that sometimes they can be inaccurate and biased therefore you have to be careful if you are using them as sources of information. The second article I read informed me that this is a digital world and the read/write web has exploded in this day and age. It is very important to connect to students in this way otherwise they will far surpass us if we refuse change. In the articles that contain information about netiquette, hoaxes, e-mail privacy and acronyms I realized that the web is a whole other atmosphere that I have yet to discover. Although I was aware of some the information, I was still surprised by the other. In the articles about discussion lists I realized that there are other ways to communicate and receive information about topics that interest you and it’s as easy as signing up to that particular list of interest. In the articles that contained information about the world wide web I became more aware and gained a greater respect for those who maintain websites.”
Socialize students into the culture of both the theoretical and the practical aspects of the discipline…
I’ve never been a digitally literate person, until now! Had someone told me a year ago that I would be blogging I would have laughed at them and said, what’s a blog? So that’s a little exaggerated, I think I knew what a blog was before this class. However, I did not know how obtain one or use one. I learned very quickly and realized that it is a very efficient way of applying what I have learned not only as a journal for myself, but also a way to share my knowledge with others that may choose to read my blogs. After I learned the aspects of blogging I was then sharing information about the other things that I learned as a result of this class. In the third week of this class I evidenced in my participation memo that I had learned new ways of obtaining information. The following is the information that I learned about in week 3.
“ This week I learned what a wiki and collaborative editing is, how to use it, who is using it, why it is significant, the downsides of both, where it is going in the future and the implications for teaching and learning.”
Inspire students to consider different ways of being, knowing, and doing…
As a result of this class I have now joined several mailing lists, created several different accounts for a number of things and learned that I can no longer take for granted the things that I “thought” were free to use online. By doing these things I have become an active member in the online community. I’m no longer just chatting on Facebook and using that for sources of “information”. I now know how to find that information elsewhere and it’s not just by googling it. Whether or not Mrs. McComas knows it or not she has created a searching monster out of me. Google is not sufficient any longer and if it is from Wikipedia, don’t trust it! I always used Wikipedia as a “reliable” source but realized shortly into this class that it is not what I thought it was. I now actually enjoy searching for information and have learned effective ways of doing so. By joining mailing lists I was communicating with other professionals who gave great factual information as well as experiential information. This helped prepare me for my research project and actually got me interested in the topic more so than I already was. Now that I have learned how to join mailing lists I can subscribe to lists that interest me outside of school.
I feel like the most impactful “doing” experience that I had this semester was creating my Movie Maker video. I learned a new way to present my information in an interesting and fun way. While uploading this project to Google I had an insight that almost made the project even more worthwhile. I realized that this is an excellent way to share other projects that I have created without using programs such as Youtube. Almost immediately after this project was finished I decided to share another video that I had made, using Photo Story, through Google Videos.
The most important thing that I changed since this class was the way in which I use images and audio that I get from the internet. A specific week was spent on copyright issues and it made me realize that it is very important and the consequences of not following those rules can be harsh. I now have a much greater respect for individual’s pieces of work as well as a greater knowledge base of how to go about getting permission to use other’s work.
Promote learning partnerships and learning communities…
How great is email? After this course I can tell you that it is amazing. Through our class mailing list that I had neglected in previous classes I was able to ask questions not only to Mrs. McComas, but also to my fellow students. I realized how genuinely caring everyone was because they were so willing to help with any question that one of us might have had. If one of my classmates couldn’t answer the question, Mrs. McComas was there monitoring to chime in when we needed her. Class emailing helped right up until the end of the class by emailing our frustrations about our Movie Maker project. This way of communication was extremely efficient because each person got to see what everyone was dealing with and could give helpful advice when needed. Many times more than one person has a question about the same thing and this email list was great for answering those types of questions. It has already been discussed that when we all graduate we will create our own mailing list to stay in contact for not only friendly emails, but also to provide eachother with helpful information about our experiences as SLP’s.
While participating in our online discussions with Tapped-In we also created a new learning community that not many of us had participated in before. From week 7 I obtained the following information by participating in the online classroom.
“By starting the week off with the online classroom I learned how to function in an atmosphere such as that. It taught me to log in properly, use different functions to make the classroom more user friendly, to take turns and most importantly it answered questions I had based on the ones that I had asked as well as the ones that my classmates asked. I learned from our guest speaker, Katie, that being an SLP takes a lot of work and creativity as well as lots of knowledge.”
Facilitate improvement in the ability to communicate effectively, in the discourse of the discipline, in both oral and written formats…
This objective was evidenced by many things. The most important one being our personal weblogs. By blogging we were able to share the information we obtained using educated discussions of the material that we had read or activities that we had participated in. By blogging we shared ideas and feelings about what we learned and shared that information with others who may be reading our blogs. We used the discourse of the material and activities to discuss those things in our blogs. When it came to completing our I-Search Paper we evidenced discourse of the discipline that we were researching. The discourse was mainly literacy, but each individual student focused on different topics dealing with literacy. Sharing our research with eachother by peer reviews we were able to effectively critique eachother’s work using that same discourse that helped improve eachother’s work. Ultimately the fruits of our labor were evidenced in our video project that combined all our research throughout the semester. This video used that same discourse that we had used all along, just in a more creative way.
I feel that I have achieved the learning objectives by participating in class discussions, whether online or in person, engaging with learning activities, and completing assingments. This class not only provided the fullfillment of a credit, but it also met my life objectives by creating a new sense of being and knowledge as a person.
