Week+4+Assignment+Part+4.2.+Comprehensive+Exam

**EDLD 5366, Digital Graphics/Desktop Publishing**
====This course was important to me for a couple reasons. It was in this class that I really started to get to know the other students in the program. I remember some of the discussion posts that were laugh out loud funny and at the same time very insightful. Many of us were having a hard time with the animation in Second Life. It was at that point that a few of us started emailing each other back and forth with suggestions and the occasional venting. By the time we got to the Teaching with Technology course we were a team. We worked on all the group projects together up to producing the PSADiana Sulivan, Elizabeth Pressler, Karen James, and Merritte Threadgill have been and continue to be a source of inspiration to me.====

====The content of the course was fascinating as well. I have always enjoyed photography and design, but had no real knowledge of design principles. Learning about C.R.A.P. color, repetition, alignment, and proximity was a revelation. I have used it in everything from setting-up my classroom, taking better photos, appreciating art, and decorating my house. I was just thinking that it may seem funny that the influential class I list first has more to do with art than technology or leadership. But I suppose that one could argue that both tech, leadership, and teaching require more than a little art.==== ====Designing the newsletter really made me keep the audience, parents and children, in mind. I found it was a balancing act between wanting to give the families as much school information as possible, yet make it accessible with an attractive easy to read design. This course reminded me that HOW you communicate is just as important as WHAT you communicate.====

**EDLD 5363, Multimedia and Video Technology**
====This course was very inspiring to me. It reminded me of how creative you can be using multimedia technology. It also showed me the possibilities of communicating in a fun and creative way. I started thinking of all the ways I would like to incorporate this into my classroom with my students. I decided after this course that I really wanted to get serious about having my students do digital-age projects (Boss & Krauss, 2007). I had always wanted to do them, but the pressures of the day to day teaching and the lack of resources made it difficult. I renewed my commitment to make these kinds of projects happen with the resources I have, or don't have, available.==== ====But technology always has it's challenges and working with video has more than it's fair share of them. I found myself often frustrated with how different video codecs and files did not work with certain programs or websites. Since we were collaborating on the different components of the PSA, there were a lot of variables in programs, formats, etc. I wanted it to be flawless and easy. But then I remembered, since when has working with technology or facilitating it been easy? In fact, at an average school site it has never been easy. There's the aging Apple iMacs in the classrooms, the virus ridden PC's next to them, intermittent internet access, and the new laptops that only half of the teachers received. Meanwhile, the district is requiring online attendance, grading, and professional development. Trying to facilitate the teachers using technology in this chaotic environment is a monumental undertaking. It's even more challenging if the the teachers are not technologically literate to begin with. This has been my experience anyway in a large urban school district.==== ====To sum up, this course was pivotal to me as it rekindled my desire to incorporate multimedia in the classroom. It reminded me how difficult it can be to manage all the different pieces of technology at a typical school site. I am pretty technologically savvy, and I find it difficult. How much harder it is for some of our teachers who are digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001).====

**EDLD 5344 School Law**
====If you had told me at the beginning of this program that School Law would have been one of my favorite classes, I would have laughed at you. But surprisingly to me, it was one of my top six. I am not sure exactly what it was that made such an impression on me. I think this course really showed me the background of Special Education. Since I am not an administrator or planning to be one, the parts of the class on search and siezure, or disciplining a teacher were of little interest. But I have been in Individual Education Plan meetings. I have filled out evaluation forms on students for the school psychologist. I have students mainstreaming in my classroom.==== ====This class showed me all the reasoning and federal law that was behind Special Education. All of a sudden, things made sense to me that never did before. I am a whole-to-part learner. In other words, I need to see the whole, or big picture, in order to make sense of the parts. I saw how Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, I.D.E.A laid the groundwork for federal special ed policy (Hyatt, 2007). I understood how a free appropriate public education, F.A.P.E., was at the root of mainstreaming and the resource specialist program, or RSP. Much of what I didn't understand about special ed placement hinged on the definition of appropriate.==== ====This course also helped me to understand interrelationship of federal, state, and local policies in education. And that there are four sources of law that apply to education; constitutional, judicial, administrative, and statutory. I always knew that education law was convoluted and now I know why! But this course also brought home the huge stake that our society has in education. That's why there are so many laws and regulations from so many different areas. So as interesting as I found the law, even in spite of myself, I was also reminded of the great responsibility I have as an educator.====

**EDLD 5364, Teaching with Technology**
====I suppose it was a given that this course would be included. After all, I am a teacher enrolled in a master’s program about educational technology. The title of this course sums up my reason for being in this program. Teaching with technology has always been problematic for me due to a lack of resources.====

====Previous to this year, the last time I was in the classroom I had four aging iMac computers that I rescued from salvage. I had networked them together so they could share an aging inkjet printer. We did have a computer lab, but let’s just say the teacher who ran it had her own ways of doing things. I guess all that is to say, I wasn’t keeping up on what was available for tech in the classroom, because I had no opportunity to use it.==== ====This course used constructivist principles and allowed us to work as a team to design a unit of study. This is exactly what I wanted to be doing. I want to apply constructivist principles along with project-based learning using technology (Solomon & Schrum, p.38-39). I was glad that our group chose my grade level, sixth, for our project. We had a mixture of middle school and elementary teachers, so sixth grade was chosen.==== ====I was proud of our final project and learned so much from the different perspectives of my group members. When I get ready to teach force and motion to my students I will be using our work as a major resource. I have always believed in and used constructivist principles in my teaching, especially science. I felt validated as a teacher by the material in the course and my interactions with my colleagues.====

**EDLD 5362, Information Systems Management**
====This course allowed me to get behind-the-scenes of the overall technology plan of my district, Los Angeles Unified. I knew there had to be some sort of plan that they were following but I had no idea what is was. As I discussed in the previous section, what I saw of tech at the school site was often a disorganized mess. I was able to find a 10 year technology plan on the district website from 2000. This gave me the great opportunity to see how well they have done for the duration of the plan.====

====I found that they actually did a pretty good job. One of the main goals was to improve the computer pupil ration especially at the middle and high schools (Los Angeles Unified School District, 2000). This goal they were able to meet. But what was even more striking when I read the document, was how much technology has changed. The internet at that time was pre-web 2.0. There was no mention of anything interactive at all. It was focused primarily on software programs, networking, and hardware.====

====The other reason this course was important had to do with the present. I have been an onsite trainer for a new program called myData that allows the teachers to access information from the district’s School Information System, SIS, in an easy and user-friendly way. Previously all the student data such as attendance, grades, periodic assessment data, California Standards Test scores, etc. were not readily accessible to teachers. The teachers needed administrative approval to access the system. The system itself was a cumbersome, hard to use, database program. So of course, very few teachers actually used it. MyData was the friendly user interface on the SIS.==== ====What I learned about SIS’s in general and about my district specifically, allowed me to better train the teachers at my school site. I have a much greater appreciation for the complexities of a school and district’s information systems.====

====This course, like EDLD 5344, were a surprise to me. I had always thought of education research as completely removed from the classroom, with little or no practical application. But what really caught my interest was the whole idea of action research (Dana, 2009).====

====In action research, even how to determine the focus of the research was completel refreshing. It was based in “Finding a Wondering” (Dana, ch.2). this is what really struck a chord in me. Here was research based on a real problem that someone needed to solve at a school site. What a change this was from some of the didactic research reports I have read that did absolutely nothing to improve the learning of our students.====

====The idea of reflecting on practice was another important component. I could completely relate to some of the anecdotes in the class about being too busy too reflect on practice and situations. But I know that it is critical. We have done lots of reflections in this program, but I have found that I can meaningfully reflect on my teaching while gardening or going for a walk. My brain and imagination are free to go deep and approach the problem in different ways, without the pressure of performance.====

====I am in cohort 6 so I did not have this at the beginning of this program, but I can absolutely see the value of conducting action research as part of the internship. I was just thinking that since I am not a principal I can’t use this right now. I immediately realized that I can indeed find my wondering and reflect on how to research it right here and right now. Maybe I will tackle that after I am done with this final class.====

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