Learning Summary

My personal goals were to learn as much as I could about digital media and use it in an educational setting. I learned about digital media and integrating it in curriculum last summer, but wanted to learn more. My professional goals are in digital media and education. For the last 5 years I have been interested in teaching how to use technology in the classroom and how it can engage the student to promote a higher level of learning.

What I knew before my first graduate course in elearning was that there are resources that can be found on the Internet for free, and can be used with curriculum. I have pretty good background knowledge for office software products because I worked as an administrative assistant for nearly 6 years and I own and use a PC and MAC.

This Course developed an understanding for promoting my skills and interests by creating media pages about my love for technology and exchanging ideas and comments with other people and teachers with the same interests through the Internet. This will also encourage teachers and technology enthusiasts to follow my technology blog. I also realized that I have to make myself visible. I learned to promote myself, my educational background and skills on an “About” Google page.

I learned new presentation software with Prezi.com, and I think I encouraged some classmates to try Picnik.com, Wordle.net, and look into how to create a webquest for the subject that they teach. I was happy to see some classmates’ digital storytelling projects and curriculum pages. They were very unique. I also relied on the support of other to help me reflect on what I could be doing better and hope I was there for my classmates too.

I think we accomplished more than we thought we could as our projects integrated into a bigger project. I am glad to have a permanent record of the Curriculum Wikipage, Prezi presentation, Slideshare, blog and "About" page. Preparing artifacts and reflections in a portfolio gave me a chance to look for my best work and tie it to technology standards for a final project.

I do regret the portfolio wasn’t portable as a standalone product like rcampus.com or foliospaces.com, but I am sure Dr.K. is on it for next semester.
I have attached a Wordle poster of some topics and words and phrases from this semester. –Janet

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