What hopes/thoughts do you have on how fellow cohort members can support you with completing your capstone and how you can support them? How will you work to support positive cohesion among your cohort? I am very excited to have the support of my cohort as we near the finish line of our capstone projects. Being held accountable every week to my fellow colleagues has really helped me to put forth my best effort throughout this educational journey. I look forward to the “critical friends” aspect of providing constructive feedback. I know that I always benefit from stepping back and seeing my work through another set of eyes, and hopefully I can help others improve upon their projects as well. I think the diversity of teachers and grade levels in our cohort will enhance everyone’s final results since we all have our unique talents, backgrounds and lenses. Often just one simple “I wonder…” from another teacher is enough to accelerate our own learning. I have no worries that our cohort will continue to work positively with each other since this truly is a special group of people. Time constraints do force us to use our time wisely so I hope that we will all be able to keep up with our own project deadlines so that we have the opportunity to meaningful support one another.
ANALYZING 3 TIL CAPSTONE PROJECTS
DEARBORN: Logo The simple design of the diver and the computer at first made me think about how to learn more about using technology in the classroom. The words underneath the logo “Diving Into Digital Tools to Develop Early Literacy” made me think this was going to be geared toward primary teachers (grades K-2). After looking through the site, I believe that the term “Early” should have been removed because it took me a moment to realize that most of her resources were geared toward upper elementary age students. I enjoyed seeing the previous drafts of her logo and reading how her Cohort’s feedback inspired her to change it. It definitely was improved! Audience The audience for this project was clearly her fellow elementary school teachers. Her resources were age appropriate and I especially enjoyed her “How-To” page with video tutorial links to the resources that she recommended. After reading that she was a teacher at NVLA, I expected to see more bilingual resources. My only confusion in her audience was some of the resources seemed appropriate for upper elementary only, but her logo said “Early Literacy”
GOTTFRIED: Logo- My first impression of this logo was that obviously it was about blogging. Due to the juvenile looking font, I imaged the audience would be younger kids/elementary school teachers. I am not sure if all 4 words in the logo (teach, connect, learn, inspire) best represented what the entire website was all about which really made me question the 3 word tagline I have chosen. Visually it was appealing with the different sized speech bubbles and color scheme. Audience- This was an interesting site to explore because the audience was for both high school students and their teachers. There were video tutorials teaching her students how to use Weebly and also resources expliciting teaching the staff about the value of blogging. I even clicked into the Weebly links to see if she could teach me something! Her pages were very clear and her writing/evidence made a strong case for the importance of teaching high school students how to design a practical portfolio that would ultimately help them find a job.
VALE: Logo- The logo was very clear both visually with the connected hands and the words below Classroom Community. It was interesting to see her original versions of her logo included the words Class Comm which seems clever, but actually might be a bit confusing with the “.com” concept which made me imagine it might be about how to use digital tools in a global environment. Her final choice was much more clear which makes me wonder (again!) if my tag line is clear enough. Audience- Her audience was very clearly directed at teachers and was visually very clear right from her home page DQ “ Is Your Classroom…?” The placement of the video link directly on the home page with the face of a caring teacher bending down talking to a student made me want to click into the video to find out more. I wasn’t quite sure at first if the audience was teachers at all levels, but as I navigated through the site it became clear (especially with her assessment/rubric page which I loved!) that it was for elementary school teachers.