Journal 7: Reflect on Professional Learning Networks

In my opinion, professional learning networks are a great asset to have in one’s professional, even personal life. I believe this way due to the fact that I was able to gain a great amount of information from these networks that added to my classroom. For instance, from Classroom 2.0, I was able to learn about a few different strategies that I could include in my lesson plans in order to increase my student’s phonemic awareness. These strategies involved including songs and movement in my lessons where I am focusing on phonemic awareness. Another professional learning network that I believe is very helpful was the RSS feed we created in class. I believe that the RSS is beneficial due to the fact that all of the information I could imagine searching for was all in one place. It made life so much easier. For instance, for my reading centers in my classroom, I need to find various worksheets or activities for my students to complete for the sound they learning that week. Instead of searching on google, I used my RSS feed to look through the various blogs I followed, which allowed me to gain multiple worksheets and activities in a short amount of time, rather than searching through google for them. Lastly, I used Twitter as a professional learning network by searching and following different primary teachers that could give my helpful ideas to incorporate into my class. As one can see, the learning networks can be a great asset to a person’s professional life, but I believe it can enhance one’s personal life too by making all of the information they feel is important or interesting all in one place.

Journal #6: Self-Relfection

When I first heard the requirements for GED 512, I was a bit scared to take this course, due to my limited knowledge with web development. However, after completing the first five weeks of this course, I can now see that web development is not as hard as I expected it to be. In these first five weeks I have been able to learn many new things about web development, which deal with html and css. In html, I learned that this form is simply a list of “codes” that tell the computer what the content is in a website. For instance, there is a series of different codes depending on the look you want your website to have, such as p for paragraph, li for list and strong for bold. Also, there is an even bigger list of codes that deal with css that I have learned. CSS is a style page that tells the computer how the website should be viewed. The css component of a html page also has codes, but are much different, because they deal with the look of the website. For instance, some codes are for background color, the type of text and style of the headers. Due to my new knowledge of html and css, I have been able to complete many assignments that have allowed me to use the knowledge I have gained. One assignment that was one of the hardest for me to complete was the very first book exercises we completed, due to the fact that I was not comfortable with html and css. This assignment was creating the Black Goose Bistro website which can be seen here: http://www.cpp.edu/~mctravieso/GED512/book/bistro/

On the other hand, one assignment that was the most rewarding for me was the book assignment where we created a contest entry form. This was the most rewarding due to the fact that I did not think that I would be able to create anything besides a “website” in this course. This assignment can be seen here: http://www.cpp.edu/~mctravieso/GED512/book/contest_entry.html. There are many other assignments that I created, but I am very interested in learning more about web development in order to increase my knowledge.