During this course I gained another perspective in how important are some elements of design are in the teaching field, the communication with the community that people should start creating their self-brand since their early years and all they do in social networks could impact positively or negatively in their lives (Utech, 2010).
The new information that I get in this course helped me to expand my knowledge and go deeper in my understanding. I found that the design of the logo was a structured task and is not just art or inspiration. I had some concepts about animation from my experience with Macromedia Flash, but using scratch was very productive because I learned a different way to make animations. At this moment I cannot say which is better. I think that both have different features and we can use the software that we feel more comfortable to work with.
I think that my personal experiences were a good asset in my understanding and affected positively in how I developed my assignments, but definitely I leaned not just to say that something is looking good at a glance, because we need to open our eyes to see the Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and the Proximity. (Yearwood, 2010).
Learn as learner
My strategies for doing my assignments are first read what we need to complete the assignment and see what information is in the readings. At the same time, I try to recall my past experiences and my current job and find the relationship between them.
I think that trying to evaluate or assess your own work is one of the hardest tasks. When you evaluate others’ work you just need to compare if parameters match the established criteria. If the work matches your criteria it is right. However, when you do a work, certain traits or your personality is embedded into the criteria and your can make a bias opinion. It was too difficult for me to design my own logo, and for this reason I asked for opinion from other people in how do I look like for them.
The discussion forums, web conferences, wiki and blog interactions were very resources for my because some time my ideas fluid suddenly in my mind and it help me to organize my thoughts and to develop ideas in different perspectives or even a deeper way.
Lifelong Learning Skills
All that I have learned in this course impacts in my professional development, because I have gained more understanding in how a logo can show what I am: my convictions, my activities and some traits of my personality. I interact with colleagues and the community. For this reason, the directives in how we can communicate throughout the newsletter can be used in general when we send letters home.
The interactions and collaboration with my colleagues is a summative action of knowledge because every classroom and every school face different challenges. For instance, comments from some colleagues leaded our school to invest in Eduphoria to help instruction and testing.
For future research I would like to investigate more on what are the best accommodations for students with special needs students with special needs. Because, I have seen that there are some learning gaps created for language barrier more than learning disabilities and to support English language learners, classrooms and schools must provide many avenues for exploring, learning, and practicing reading, writing, speaking, and listening (NREL, 2010). For instance in third grade were four student that initially they get less than 20 in their math and reading test, they are Spanish speakers but they do not have necessarily a learning disability. White some accommodations for their language they improved for over 70s.
References:
Utech, J. (2010). Creating your personal brand. Retrieved from http://www.thethinkingstick.com/creating-your-personal-brand
Yearwood , J. (2010). Desing Principles. Lamar University.
Northeast Regional Educational Laboratory. (n.d). Meeting the needs of diverse learners. Retrieved from http://www.netc.org/earlyconnections/pub/sec3.pdf
