EDTECH 543: Final Reflection

I can’t believe the time has come for my final blog posting for EDTECH 543: Social Network Learning.  Social media doesn’t seem to be going anywhere or slowing down and knew this course would be valuable to me as an educator and professional.  Through this course, I really started to think about how I can leverage social media in my classroom and in my own life (personal and professional).   I was also pushed to do things that were a little outside my comfort zone or regular activity. 

Prior to this course, I was not a part of the Twitter world and rarely posted in my other social networks for professional purposes.  So sending out tweets was a completely new experience.  I discovered that Twitter is a great tool for professional development which I will continue to use and will also incorporate into my classroom activities.  Before, I also really didn’t belong or participate in many professional communities.  So joining and participating in new communities was a big step for me, which now seems like a breeze and I wouldn’t have a second thought about reaching out to others in these forums.  It also opened me up and pushed me to join other communities for my personal hobbies and interests.

All the assignments I had to complete were worthwhile for me, not only in my learning and understanding but I would love to incorporate all of them in some form into my own teaching practice and “toolbox”.  Some of my favorite assignments and tools in the course were with the art of curating a topic and creating pictures or diagrams to synthesize and showcase my understanding.  I had never even heard of curation before and found this to be a really meaningful assignment.   I also enjoyed blogging which surprised me.  At first, I wasn’t too excited to have to keep up a blog but found myself really enjoying writing down my thoughts and reflecting on my journey.   I would rate my overall performance above average; I really tried to put some time into my blog postings and incorporate graphics to enhance my ideas.  However, I do wish I would have written blog posts when they were not required to continue my reflective work and to generate something that I could look back to for those particular assignments. I do intend on keeping up with blogging in my professional and personal life.  As an educator, there are so many ideas I thought of with incorporating blogging into my classroom. I really think students would benefit from writing and reflecting on different science laboratories or with connecting with other science classes and researchers. 

I don’t think I had any challenges that were out of the ordinary of taking courses and learning new skills and concepts.  Out of all activities, the mini-curricular unit was probably the most difficult assignment due to feeling a little time constraint. I think I would have liked this assignment introduced earlier in the semester so I would have been thinking about it over a longer time period, maybe in an email.  That would be my advice to future students, to think about how you would incorporate social media activities in current or upcoming lessons and how you would put them all together in a unit.   

Through this class, I realized how easily social networks can be incorporated into learning activities to create more meaningful and engaging experiences.   I really hope that schools and/or districts will be more open to using social networking platforms in the classroom.  I think we are doing a disservice to students by avoiding social platforms that students are currently using and not teaching them proper use or responsibility with the actual application of how they can grow personally and professionally.   Overall I had an outstanding experience with this course, with finding great value in each assignment and I would definitely recommend this course to all other educators.