Project #8

My Reflection

The road to completion has been an interesting journey. The journey began the very first time my fellow students and I walked into the classroom.  Over the course of this semester in EDU 314 I have learned a lot of things, inluding patience, which many times creates the best product. In the beginning of the class I was pretty caught up with work because things seemed easy to me.  I have taken computer classes before and even built my own website from scratch!. However, using the google sites program was fun, because it provided options for you to choose from when it comes to themes and text layouts. I feel confident and comfortable using it to possibly make other sites in the future. So, creating the website was very easy for me.  The one thing that I struggled with from the very beginning in this class was getting my links to work. I knew how to link things but I learned that I was not uploading them correctly onto filezilla.  This class was my very first experience with filezilla and a program that we used often, nvu. Filezilla was a little hard to get used to at first because of the fact that it was new to me. I feel that I have grown through the experience of using different microsoft programs, like publisher, new concepts in old ones like word.  
This course was important because it helped prepare me for the web aspect of my future teaching experience.  The truth is that today we depend on computers a lot.  Whether it be to have fun and play games or do assignments. The computer is very important to the advancement of a childs education. This class helped me to understand ways to engage the students in my classroom.  Without having to deal with the frustration of a teacher who doesn't understand the time we are in technologically.
One of the most exciting experiences for me in this course was to  make a photostory.  I have never been able to capture something so important to me that hasn't just been a picture.  This was in movement and it made the moments captured feel alive.  I thought of the photostory as a refreshing way for students to capture their own most important moments.  For example when we are discussing the concept of community.  The first definition we really have is of family .  In classrooms that I haev visited I have seen teachers encourage students to bring in pictures of their family to put up in a special corner of the classroom.  Students can have the chance to share the importance of their families and maybe even heritage in a photostory assignment.
One of the biggesy frustrations for me in EDU 314 was not making my pages but linking them to my projects page.  For a while in the begiining of the class I had an ongoing problem where my links would not show up when I opened my page in studentweb.cortland.edu.  Continously dealing with that hurdle was really frustrating. Then come to find out, that mozilla has this wierd thing with new links and it came up fine on internet explorer.
In terms of working in groups, it was really helpful to split work and combine ideas.  I don't think our webquest would have came out as well, if I would have done it myself . The experience of working in groups is really important to any elementray classroom because then students are able to do cooperative learning and also build relationships with their peers. The relationship benefits them as well as their friends, and the teacher as well.
Small group work is very powerful as I said before.  Also for providing different viewpoints or sides of a topic to be aware of.
I think that it's possible to do small group work using technology like a powerpoint.  Where the group picks a topic and then individually takes on roles for each subtopic. I think my students will have the freedom of choosing a topic from a long list of topics.  The roles that are different parts of that topic will be up to the students but must be approved by the teacher.

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