Module 5: Reflective Journal

This week’s reading on Christine Casey’s “Studying the First Amendment: Exploring Truth in Journalism” and its application on the taxonomy of assessment was quite challenging. In the first activity, when we had to apply the learning objective and activities into the taxonomy, I felt many of the activities (as a whole) could have applied to more than one taxonomy. All activities needed a previous knowledge of the subject in order to comprehend the issue, and then be able to apply it in order to analyze it. There wasn’t a clear cut in many of them, but, it was a great analytical activity. It was reassuring to read my classmates comments and to know that I was not alone in my feelings.

I also read each group’s midterm project. I thought GROUP 1 was very creative in unifying their tools to a central theme: “Creating Cultural Connections.” The "Getting to know you" survey in Survey Monkey was very creative and also tied in with the cultural theme. EPals had great links, which helps the reader to visualize what this tool is all about. I read with great interest all about Adobe Connect since I've never tried Breeze and we were going to explore it on Saturday (yesterday).

GROUP 2's presentation looked very professional by including an image of each tool and a list of additional resources at the end. EPals, in particular, caught my attention because my daughter's 4th grade class started a class blog, and I wonder if eventually it will evolve to an EPal. I thought that this group’s last sentence "...we help prepare students to live, learn, and work in an ever-changing technological society" summarized beautifully the reason we are taking these courses.

GROUP 3 did a detailed review of each tool. In Survey Monkey, I especially liked the fact that it did not have advertisement, and I also liked the idea of a short formative assessment prior to the beginning of each module to assess students' understanding (or lack of) of the theme to be discussed in the new module. I appreciated the comparison made between Pageflakes and other reflection tools such as Blogger.com, which is the one I'm familiar with. As for wikis, I found the link "Example of Educational Wikis" at http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/Examples+of+educational+wikis to be very useful! Visually it gave me a broader sense of all the things that can be done in a wiki. My only experience with wikis has been editing documents and I was amazed to see so many other possibilities. I even found one Spanish class wiki!

The Breeze experience on Saturday was very useful, a total hands-on the tool. I thought it was great that we can orally communicate and even visually see each other (if we had the right equipment). I find it very useful that the session can be recorded for future reference and that it has a whiteboard. The only downfall is the technology itself. If it works properly; it’s wonderful, but when there are glitches or some interruptions, it can be frustrating. Nevertheless, it seems like distance education through Breeze is close to the experience of a F2F instruction with the advantage that the lecture can be recorded! This is amazing!

Final project update: The course I will be working on is my current Spanish 4 Online course, and after reading all the tools reviewed by the four groups, I’m considering the following: calendar, wiki, survey, quiz, and blog.