EDLD_5363_Course_Reflections

 I have approached all of the courses I have taken thus far with an open mind trying not to preconceive what my exact outcome would be for each course. In approaching this course, I did hope to add depth to my pre-existing multimedia video technology knowledge. When I taught at the gifted and talented magnet in our district, I taught a course on videography. The principles covered in this course served to reinforce those I taught in the course. One unexpected outcome was the opportunity to work collaboratively with other professionals to create the Public Service Announcement. This was the first such opportunity I have had and it gave me a great sense of what my students felt when they worked on their assigned projects. Working from a distance on a common goal required cooperation from all individuals and additionally gave us the opportunity to develop relationships with fellow colleagues.
 * What outcomes had you envisioned for this course? Did you achieve those outcomes? Did the actual course outcomes align with those that you envisioned?**

**To the extent that you achieved the outcomes, are they still relevant to the work that you do in your school? Why or why not?** With regard to the opportunity to work with fellow colleagues to produce a Public Service Announcement, I feel that experience was particularly relevant to the work I perform in our district. As the Director of Instructional Technology I have recently been charged with the responsibility of increasing online learning opportunities for our district’s staff. The opportunity to work as a team toward a common goal was a great experience that I have not been able to truly feel I have done in recent days. It has given me insight as to how to better direct our team to accomplish the increase of online learning opportunities. Having worked as part of a team myself, I feel I am in a better vantage point to help our team address the issues and concerns that will arise as we work together to develop our online professional development library. I particularly enjoyed viewing the Randy Nelson video and look forward to sharing that with the entire team.

I do not feel that there are any expected outcomes that I was unable to achieve. If pressed for a response, I would have to say that I would have enjoyed the opportunity to better develop my Premiere Elements skill bank. Prior to working on our Week Two assignment using Premiere Elements, I had not worked with that video editing software. The experience I had during Week Two left me wanting more opportunities to work with the software. When we began working as a group on our Public Service Announcement, two of our group members expressed a strong desire to perform the video editing portion of the assignment. So, working as part of a collaborative team, I offered my writing abilities as my contribution. In my current position, I do not have much time to “play” with software and would have liked to have had a chance to have more “play time” and growth with the software.  I was successful in completing the course assignments. I do feel that the last-minute addition to last week’s assignment was very disheartening and discouraging. I had gone to great lengths to complete my work on Week Four’s assignment prior to going to a wedding that weekend. Had I not had such cooperative teammates who informed me of the last-minute addition to the assignment, I very likely would have not only hurt myself, but also my fellow teammates. Since all team members were required to submit the same work, I would have directly impacted my fellow colleagues’ grades. I have worked hard to maintain quality work and produce it in a timely manner. I take my responsibility of working on a team very seriously and was extremely disappointed to find out so late in the day that the game plan had been changed and I had not in fact completed the assignment.
 * What outcomes did you not achieve? What prevented you from achieving them?**
 * Were you successful in completing the course assignments? If not, what prevented or discouraged you?**

I had the opportunity to work as a member of a team cooperatively and collaboratively where I could not be in control of every move. Honestly, I learned this was a somewhat difficult thing for me to do. Over the last year and a half, I have taken on a leadership role within our district and have been required and expected to make decisions and direct individuals of our team to help them achieve a desired goal. It took great restraint to step out of that role and into the role of a collaborative team member. There were things in our finished product, our cyberbullying Public Service Announcement, that would have been drastically different had I been working on it individually. Wishing to not hurt anyone’s feelings and truly appreciate my teammates’ contributions, I kept my mouth shut and in the end found that their different approaches were not “wrong”. In fact, they were only different and often better. I was reminded once again that there is a reason God gave us two ears and one mouth.
 * What did you learn from this course: about yourself, your technology and leadership skills, and your attitudes?**