Final Reflection

Course Strands

Communication- Communication was a very important part of this second semester. We each had to communicate to our classmates through a presentation our genre and literary elements assigned to us. This was really nice because we were able to learn from everybody. Also our weekly discussions were really good and talking about books was even better. I got to learn from my peers and really enjoyed it.

Research/ Content- This semester I learned a lot of information including the different book genres and Literary Elements. I definitely got a lot better in knowing a book’s genre without looking it up. The reading of different genre books really helped.

Technology- The most important part of this semester was our webpages. I definitely had the hardest time with technology this second part of the semester. I am not sure what the problem was yet, because I did not get any help from anyone. It took a lot of time, and I finally found a computer that would cooperate with tripod, but was not as lucky to find out why my computer and the other computers would not cooperate. I will have to say that this was the worst part of this class because we did not get any help with it.

Collaboration-As a group of future educators we had very good collaboration. We tried to help each other when something went wrong or when someone did not understand something.

Five Dimensions of Learning

Confidence and Independence- Through this whole program I have to say I have grown as a person and gained confidence in myself, but at many times I rather work independently. Sometimes I am scared of saying what I belief is right, and I just keep it to myself. I have been working to get better on it, but I feel that many times when I speak up I don’t get my point across.

Skills and Strategies- The skills and strategies I have learned have been to be very patient. There have been many times this semester where I have just wanted to explode with frustration and not continue with the class, but then I calm down and try to be patient and understand. There have been many things I don’t agree with but I have learned to listen and agree with others.

Knowledge Content-I have learned a lot about literature. Now I know the different book genres very well. The literary elements are better but I am not really good at them. I have also gotten to read a lot of good books, and this will definitely help me in helping students to find a good book.

Use of Prior and Emerging Experience- This semester I had to use some prior knowledge I had for my webpage, it was not enough knowledge but it helped. I also used prior experience in putting together my presentations and presenting them to the class.

Critical Reflection- This has indeed been the longest semester I have ever had. I feel like I have grown as a person and as a teacher. Some of the things I have learned through this class will be very helpful in the future.

This semester has been a long semester. I feel like the first part of the semester was good, but in the second part everything was overloaded. I am not sure why this happened, but it seemed that in the last classes we were trying to learn the whole semesters content. I would recommend better organization for the next semester. Also, reading one hundred books in a short time was not fun. I did not get to enjoy every single book I read. I did learn really good things that will definitely help me in my classroom in the future.

Also, the webpage is a very good idea but if they worked well. Creating a webpage was very frustrating and I have gotten to the point where I hate it. Still to this point I feel like my webpage is not where I would like it to be after all the long hours I have worked on it. I would of liked to have more support with my webpage problems. I felt like I had no one to ask help for, and the persons I believed could help me could not help me. I understand that the professor can not be an expert in the subject, but at least could do an effort to help.