Contributions to Learning: 5304 and 5317

For this term, I am taking 5304: Leading Organization Change and 5317: Resources for Digital Environments. For these courses, I feel that a score of 95/100 would reflect my learning. The readings for these courses were very heavy this go around. With a full-time career in education and an event filled schedule due to being a mom of 4 kids in several extracurricular activities, it was vital that I change something for this term. In past terms, I have ordered physical copies of books and managed to read them. Although this worked in the past, I needed to change things to be successful in this fall busy season. Audiobooks are the change I needed. Changing the required readings from physical books to audiobooks allowed me to listen to books while I got ready in the morning, made the drive to work, or even while doing chores around the house. This freed up time to focus on reading physical articles to support my publication project for 5317. Although this worked really well, in the future, I think I also need to dedicate time where I can reflect on what I have read to better absorb the information. In the past, when reading physical books, I am able to highlight and annotate. This piece was missing when interacting with my readings for these courses. In the future, I would like to make sure and keep something nearby that will allow me to record my reflections as I listen to the audiobooks.

During these courses, I worked with a core group of students also taking the same courses. I worked with Joseph Perrone, Whitney Davis, Patty Hamilton, and Leah Griggs. Working with this core group allowed me to gain insight into different perspectives because we come from many different roles in education. While working with my peers, I helped support our group by taking a rubric and embedding it in a Google sheet so that we could all rate and give feedback to each others' publication rough draft. Being able to share our rough drafts with each other was such a benefit to have since I was able to make changes to my draft before submitting which helped with the clarity of my message. Our core group also came together to record a podcast that highlights the benefits of using technology to support learning. Our group all worked together to find commonalities that would provide a flow that made sense. We used our strengths to support each other in this task. Whitney was able to use her experience with editing to finalize the end product for us.

The required discussions for both courses were another piece of my learning that led to a successful term. The discussions often helped set up a context for the assignments for that week. In order to be successful on the assignments, it was imperative to complete the discussion posts on time. Being able to reflect on the different topics helped to not only voice my thoughts and connections, but also see the viewpoints from people with different perspectives and experiences. With this support, I was able to develop My Why, My Influencer Strategy, and Installing 4DX Plan. Although I completed the discussion posts on the later end of the schedule, I still was able to complete them on schedule and contribute to discussions by commenting on the reflections of my peers. Most of my discussions included references to support my views. Including more citations was a goal of mine in past courses, so I was happy to have found more ways to use required readings as well as outside sources to reference.