Personal Reflection

I was nervous about going back to school. The last time I was in school I did not have a full-time job, a home of my own, a husband, or a child. Now all of that has changed and I worried that I wouldn't be able to balance my time among my many demands. While it hasn't been easy, I've been able to manage it and I am so happy I've started this program. This course has been exciting from day one and I don't regret my decision to go back to school one bit. In fact, over the past two or so months, I've become even more excited about becoming a media specialist, and I actually regret only taking one course.
I had no idea how much I didn't know! The thought of using podcasts or digital stories (both of which I barely knew anything about before this course) to teach content is so refreshing. (And who knew Kate Paixao would be able to learn how to use Photoshop?) When I return to working in a school, I know it's going to be so different from the pencil, paper, and text book culture that I left only four years ago.
My hopes for the rest of the semester is to learn as much as I possibly can, because I know I can use all of this in my own classroom/library. I am nervous about my Web site. I'm one of the few starting from scratch, and while I have taken courses in XHTML and have experience and knowledge of the technical side of this, I am not very good at the creative end of making a Web page look nice. I have the Robin Williams book which I hope will help, and I'm going to do my absolute best. I worry because I really want this Web site to be amazing, and while I know I can make it work with all of the bells and whistles, I want it to look appealing as well. That will be my challenge. Will we be breaking off with Hugh to work on these again, or are we restricted to lab hours at this point?
I don't want to call this a suggestion, because this is something that's out of your control. I know that as a professor you are very busy, but for the first five weeks of class I was a little nervous about how I was doing because I hadn't had any feedback up until that point. Once I read your comments on my blog at that time, my mind was put at ease. On the other hand, you have made this class so interesting and I can never believe it when 9:15 rolls around because the time just seems to fly. Keep up the good work, and thank you for motivating me!

Response to Digital Goonies

I was pleasantly surprised to see the tree octopus in one of the Digital Goonies' recent postings (I wrote a post about the tree octopus earlier.) I had heard about this Web site more than a year ago, so I thought it was old news, but I guess not. Jim mentioned similar activities to those that I listed when using a Web site like that. He also listed others that are pretty much the same idea... hoaxes. I'd really like to use these one day if I have an opportunity to teach media literacy.

I also found the posting on dialmycalls.com to be useful. It would be great if something happened last minute and I had to contact all of my students' families all at once, I could make a recording and send it to all of them. How easy and practical!

I also found superlame.com to be a fun site for making creative projects. This site helps the user to make speech bubbles and such to add to their own photos.