My first semester of grad school at UCF was a whirlwind between being the Team Lead at school for my first year teaching, trying to get my students ready for 3 FCAT tests - more than the rest of the school had - and trying to re-balance my life into that of a student after a whole year out of classes. In all honesty, EME5050 acted as an anchor for me through it all, giving me items that I could incorporate into the classroom that my students would enjoy. It helped me to remember that I was taking classes when my other courses this semester had inconsistent schedules with their assignments (even if I did miss a few in this class).
This course had an abundant of assignments and mini-projects throughout its 15 weeks that really opened my eyes to educational technology, some of which acted as an added challenge to skills I previously possessed from my undergrad career in education. The important part of this course that I learned was how to use these skills in the classroom to enhance student learning. As a product of a technology age, I always prided myself on knowing how to use a lot of technological tools - but I only ever knew how to use them for myself, not how to showcase it and place it into a lesson plan for my students.
The most difficult, and rewarding, aspect of this course was pulling these skills into the culminating project. It really shed light on how much thought goes into creating a project from scratch, which was essentially what we did - a new experience for me. Finding the resources for the curriculum page had me take a few steps back to realize just what I had expected from my students when they were searching for materials, and the rubric helped me to see how I would want their final projects to pan out in the end.
I feel that after this course, I am more comfortable in creating and assigning technology projects that I previously did with ill-ease. One of my students in class had actually made a comment recently about the increase of technology they had seen in the past few months - and how it has helped them connect with the materials more. To sum it all up, this course has taught me how to be comfortable with myself as a teacher instead of relying on the uninformative curriculum the school had chosen for our first year. I have seen a lot of growth in my students, and myself, which I have this course to thank for - it has been the most rewarding class I have taken as of yet in my collegiate career.
