- What was the most valuable aspect of the course? What made it valuable?
The most valuable aspect of this course was building our PLN. While I knew of the concept, I wasn’t aware of the technicalities of it. I enjoyed exploring and finding topics that interest me and those that can help me to grow professionally and personally.
- How have your grown professionally?
Through this course, I have grown professionally by building and expanding my PLN and finding others on social media who share my same passions in education. With the mini-curricular assignment, I took the perspective of being a technology coach for my district. I used the experience to build myself in the Professional Development world. I do a lot of quick PD in my district, but I want to do bigger and better trainings, so I felt this would be the perfect time!
- How your own teaching practice or thoughts about teaching have been impacted by what you have learned or accomplished in this course?
From this course, I learned how easy it is to integrate social media in the classrooms. It’s always been a topic that I wanted to tackle, but didn’t know how. I really appreciated the social media use policy assignment as it opened my eyes to my district not having something like that in place and how critical it may be to have one for both students and staff.
- What were some challenges that you have encountered in this course?
One of the challenges I faced in this course, that I certainly didn’t realize was going to be a challenge was the lesson plans curation assignment. It took me a moment to truly understand what curation was, but then being able to find age-appropriate lessons that use the actual social media. There are so many lesson plans and activities available for elementary students who are centered around social media, but they don’t actually use the platforms, they just use a google slide, doc, word document, etc with a template that looks like the platform.
- What advice would you give future students taking the course?
Enjoy it! This was one of my favorite courses in my program and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve always loved social media, of course I have always loved education and I was able to put these two passions together. Another reason I enjoyed the course was because there are still some people who are against social media in education, so I hope this course can help some people to open up to the benefits of using social media in the classrooms.
- How would you rate/evaluate your blog performance throughout the course?
I enjoyed doing the blogs for this course! I always felt that I had plenty to say and I enjoyed the user friendly program that I chose to use. I’d love to be cool enough to have a teacher blog one day! I am trying with a colleague to begin a podcast, maybe a blog is next!
- What was some pleasant surprise you experienced during the course?
I thought I knew a lot (or all ;)) of the platforms we were going to use, but silly me, I didn’t! I enjoyed learning more about the platforms I already use (Twitter- specifically TweetDeck!) I had no idea some of the programs we used or that I found through assignments existed! That was a nice surprise, I have added a lot of tools to my tool kit (or my treasure box from a previous assignment).
- Any other thoughts and/or feedback you’d like to provide?
I thought this course was great, the pace was nice and the workload wasn’t overwhelming. It’s a great topic and extremely useful, beneficial, and engaging! I appreciate all that I learned from this course from our instructor and my peers!
EDTECH 543 SNL 