Reflection

I have to say that this class has been my favorite class I have taken, so far, towards my Master's in Ed. Tech. (and I am about half way through). It has been extremely stressful at times but I actually feel like I learned a lot of new things and a lot of new technology that was fun and useful. Not only is it useful in the world of education, but daily life and other types of jobs as well. I think that using technology in the classroom could be a lot of fun and the students would really enjoy it, but with my students being limited to desktop computers and most of them not having access to a smart phone, some of the things I learned might be challenging for them to do. But at least I can show it to them!

I feel like a lot of the design principles are very useful, but the one that I actually just discussed at my school today was the Redundancy Principle. I say this because the computer program that my students use to complete all of their course work drives me crazy. My students are forced to watch videos of someone talking, while they have the text on the screen and graphics. I have been saying since the beginning of the school year (when we started using this program) that the students do not need both the video and the text. A lot of the students would rather just have the text so they can read it themselves and move through the course at their own pace. But they are forced to watch these "lectures" which they don't really watch anyway, but they have to wait for the lecture to end before they can proceed any further in the course. The program that we used before this year did not have the lectures. The students and I miss that program and get really impatient when we have to wait for the video lectures to finish before we can do anything. The Redundancy Principle just proves my thinking (and the students) that the videos are not necessary for them to complete their coursework successfully.

The only readings that I really remember are the Design Principles for Multimedia Instruction. I liked the fact that we referred back to them every week throughout the entire course as we created our weekly blog posts. Blogging was something that was completely new to me when I began this course and it is something that I never saw myself being interested in doing (or even being interested in knowing how to do it), but it is kind of fun.

I enjoyed learning about all of the technologies in this course, as most of them were new to me. I enjoyed creating all of the weekly assignments EXCEPT the Augmented Reality. I cannot understand why that is so difficult for me to figure out how to create. I have decided that I am going to blame the failure to create a working Aura on my junky laptop and my old phone. My favorite assignment was probably the Storify because it utilizes multiple different sources and brings everything together in a really easy to follow format. It was very user friendly and the fact that you can link things from so many different sources makes it useful in the classroom and not very time consuming for the teacher to create.

I am hoping that for the future my students will begin working with a different online program that lets them do more fun activities, like the things I learned in this class. I am hoping to get them access to some tablets or Ipads so that they can create some projects and actually do some collaborative work in small groups. I think they would really have fun with some of the technologies that I learned about in this class. I would love to see what kind of things they could come up with and the things that they could create. This has definitely been my favorite class and I would love to learn about more of these useful educational technology tools.