ECOMP 7007 – Midcourse Evaluation

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the amount, variety and depth of material that we’ve been through so far. I came into the course with a good background in many of the subject areas and was concerned, as you were, that it would be a repeat of what I already know. I have learned so much so far. I look to see how material is taught to teachers and what is covered as much as looking to learn the technology – I already know a lot of the nuts and bolts. There have been a few areas of enlightenment where the light bulb goes on in my head and I finally “get it”. Information literacy was one of those. November’s book, in addition to some great websites I found, really taught me the importance of teaching today’s students how to navigate and learn in the information world. The online projects exercise was another area where I hadn’t really understood what they were about until you provided the resources you did.

I try to push my realm with each exercise – if I already knew how to do what the course requirement is, reframe it a little and spend the time learning something new or putting the knowledge to good use. Even the search engine exercise showed me how easy it is to fall into a habit and routinely use what we know and are comfortable with. I learned a lot about the different kinds of search engines, about new search engines, meta search engines and more depth about how to use them. There are a couple of topics we’ve covered that I’ve started to build web pages and research good links to share with our teachers and community.

The listserv/newsgroup information has been very useful to me. Some of the resources we’ve found have been very useful and I plan to share them with others. I had been looking for resources to help get more involved in the world of technology in education. It’s so obvious that there are many districts that are way ahead of the pack and many that are way behind but in general the education world is going through a dramatic change and the sharing of experiences and information is enlightening.

And the discussions posted online have been great. I’ve learned a lot from some of the others and have enjoyed their use of the discussions. This is one of the better ones I’ve been involved in.

I also appreciate the time you take to respond to messages, posts and e-mails. It’s difficult in an online class to get to know the teacher and others in the class but it’s worked well in this class and it’s been informative for me to see how you model good communications online.

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