The semester was a long one, but the feeling of length only lends to the feeling of having learnt something new. Going into the course, I had a vague idea of what it was that we'd be focusing on. Walking into the classroom, I thought I was there to learn how to use overhead projectors and powerpoint. We ended up, instead, learning much more useful materials, such as learning how to build web-based structures, such as webquests, webpages, and group developed lesson plans, in order to use those tools as an ends and a medium to a student's education. More important information that I picked up from this course is learning how to grade both, websites for the sake of education, and students by creating an accomplished, and fair rubric.Even further into the helpful things I've learnt is how to use technology for the help and benefit of students with special needs, such as websites that can appeal to children who don't know how to focus, or websites that can help a student express themselves in ways that they they are incapable of offnet.
Some things that could have changed for the benefit of the course and it's students include having weekly assignments that continue to be due each week, even when the focus of the student in this class should be on the bigger assignment that takes up more time than the weekly assignment, but is due the same week. For the most part, every professor does this for their own class, which means a lot of time is taken up for each and every class that a student is in, leaving no time for a student to question or study, because they have to focus on the next weekly assignment for their other class, and the next large assignment in that same class. This leads to work that's half-assed because of the lack of enough time to focus. A heavy workload isn't necessarily synonymous with being an abundance of work. Some of the instruction on what is looked for in the blogging assignments and their multimedia accompaniments could use some fine-tuning in the department of detail.
