Journal #7 Professional Learning Network

The affinity group I joined was Edutopia. After reading the lists, looking at many, this seemed very interesting to me, due to the fact that it covers many topics. As a physical education teacher, there aren’t too many of the affinity groups that were specific to my content area.

After reading, researching, and exploring Edutopia I found that I liked the realistic topics. There were many teachers who discussed real life lessons such as adding blogs into their weekly assignments to increase writing assignments for students. There was an article on different apps to use in for students to increase their reading skills. Some topics are focused for the teachers and others were more focused on the students and ways to improve the lessons. I found this to be useful and fun. So many people have great ideas, and it is a wonderful place for people to share their experiences and ideas.

Reading Edutopia brought back the excitement to improve my lessons. In physical education I don’t get to use technology often, for lack of a classroom. However, there are so many ideas out there such as; twitter, blogs for homework, apps, and more. There are really endless possibilities out there, and it was really interesting to read all of the ideas that real life teachers use in their classrooms.

Journal #6 Self-Reflection

While signing up for this class, I found myself extremely overwhelmed with the assignments. It is challenging learning, essentially a new language using HTML and CSS. In the beginning of the quarter I felt as though creating a website would be impossible for someone like me. I understand how to use technology, but not how it works (if that makes sense.)

Throughout the course of this class I have learned to pay serious attention to detail. By forgetting a semicolon or forgetting to close a tab the entire page will look different. I am not a very patient person and this has been a true test. There are many moments of wanting to simply give up, but with further investigation and troubleshooting, most problems will be fixed. I still struggle with certain details. Oftentimes in the program the assignment will look correct, but once I open it in a browser things look differently. This is challenging because it looks correct in one viewer, and differently in another. I hope I can figure out whatever it is that I am doing wrong.

The most rewarding part about this class so far has simply been the progress I have made. Although I still find the class extremely challenging, each time I create anything from a project in class or a book exercise I feel accomplished.