Part 1: Reflect on your process of building your website in terms of design, putting content and what you can now do… Part 2: How can you take what you’ve learned from this master’s program out into the world and into your classroom immediately? Part 3: Finally, how do you plan to use what you’ve learning from this program in the future? Part 1- Building the website turned out to be a far bigger challenge than I first expected. Throughout the course of this year I had the vision that we would essentially be dropping our already completed work into a basic template and just sprucing it up a bit. Wrong! I have had several mini panic attacks along the way when I realized the scope of this project. It was very helpful to have the “What Goes Where” document as a guide otherwise I think I might have made a complete mess of the entire website. The design features of Weebly took quite a long time to figure out and I am still not completely happy with the look of all of my pages, but I have to accept that it is good enough. My current challenge as I am wrapping up my pages is to make sure that they are visually appealing while still covering the necessary content. It feels really exciting to see the end in sight! Part 2- Stepping into the student role after many years has helped me renew my appreciation of what my struggling readers face on a daily basis. Ever since the first day of school, I enlisted the support of my students and let them know that I could feel their pain of having to do homework and feeling like there wasn’t enough time in the day to get it all done. I am definitely not as intimidated by technology anymore and I no longer feel that I need to master a tool before I use it with my class. Not being afraid to fail is definitely a lifelong lesson that I will carry with me and hopefully model for my future students in years to come. Part 3- Since it took me almost a year to turn my concept into reality, I have only gotten to use my digital graph/feedback questions twice so far with my students. I can’t wait to study the results and potential impact of this tool once students use it more frequently. Now that my tools are complete, I am ready to share them with my colleagues. I am anxious to see how this tool might be adapted for primary grades and how user friendly it is for teachers with varying technical abilities. Ultimately I would like to like to help support our entire staff with professional development opportunities where we have time together to play around with new tech tools, try them out with our students, and report back to each other about our successes and struggles just like we did every week in this program. "I'm not there yet, but I am closer than I was yesterday."
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I am also very conscious of the visual appeal of my pages. I started off by having a visual for all my links on my resources page, but then I saw that it would be a mile long. SO I got rid of all the images and just make the words links. The end result is a page that is much more manageable. I was worried that it would be too plain, but my critical feedback group said they liked the tidiness of it. So I'm sticking with it. Even without the images, it still took forever to make all the live links!
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Jenny
4/21/2017 05:37:24 pm
Dana! We made it!!!!
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Kristin Pruitt
4/23/2017 09:57:27 pm
"I'm not there yet, but I'm closer than I was yesterday." That perfectly sums up my journey as well. Can you even believe we're almost there!! What a wonderful experience this cohort/masters program has been, not always easy and definitely frustrating at times. Like you I now feel comfortable testing out software with my students before completely mastering myself.
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Dana HandI teach Read 180 at Northwood Elementary School and I am passionate about reading (obviously!) In my "free time" I love hanging out with my 2 teenagers and taking our two dogs for long walks. Archives
March 2017
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