EDLD+5363+Final+Course+Reflection

EDLD 5363 Final Course Reflection Susan Haught ET8011 Cohort 7 This course was very interesting and taught me a lot about collaboration and communication. As a future technology leader, I have already immersed myself into as much technology as I learn about daily. I use my computer at work, during most of my day. The most important aspect that this course taught me was that it takes confidence and trust to go head first into an online collaboration with teammates that you have never met before. This class surprised me, and I imagine many of my classmates, in that it was relatively easy and fun to work on an online team to create our PSA. The outcome of the course was the PSA project and the skills needed to create the PSA in group collaboration. I was very pleased to work with a group of highly educated and creative educators, who were as interested and excited in the learning process as I was. This project entailed working as a group, meeting to complete assignments and create a PSA video. We followed our syllabus and went to work. We each contributed and helped each other. We would listen to each of our team member’s thoughts and build upon them. It was quite a learning experience. I think that I will definitely use this information in my current position, at the university. I will try to advise my students of the pros of working in groups in an online environment. It is easy and very user friendly. You can meet with your team members at any place and at any time, as long as they have internet and a computer. It also helps to have a web camera, for the web conferences. I think that it was very easy to complete all of the assignments for this course. I had a wonderful group to work with and they each were very knowledgeable and tech savvy. Each time that we had an assignment due, we would just email each other and remind each other of the work to be done and what we did for the group. We had our assigned tasks as of week 1 and also helped each other whenever we could. We all wanted the same goal: to do a good job and complete our assignment. This project turned out to also be a learning outcome for me as far as working in an online team. It was very fun and easy. I would like to help other educators learn how to navigate the sites that we used to get our work done: [|www.tinychat.com] and skype. We also used email, gmail, google docs, google chat and You Tube. Each site is very user friendly and I did help another one of the groups in our class, learn how to do tinychat.com. My attitude about working in an online environment has been uplifted! I really like taking this online course and I love working online, but I was very apprehensive when I saw our original assignment. I did not understand how a group of students, who have never met, could work well together to create a video. Well, my eyes were opened to a new way of working! We had an easy and fun time collaborating and communicating during this class. Of course, we did have a group filled with tech savvy educators, who are not afraid to navigate any online sites. We worked as a team and created our PSA and had fun doing it! I would recommend this kind of group project to other technology leaders to help teachers to learn to work as groups and create a common goal. Teachers need to be able to navigate through this type of technology, before they can feel comfortable teaching their students how to do it. If the teachers are using it themselves, they will teach their students how to use it in their own work.