EDU 520

Digitally Mediated Teaching and Learning

For my Master’s in Education program, I am about to complete my second class, Digitally Mediated Teaching and Learning.  At first, I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but have learned that we were meant to apply new skills using technology to research and reflect education practices.  This website was one of our first assignments in this course, and it will now be a running accumulation of work from future courses which will be a part of our final capstone project.

I truly enjoyed the hands-on approach that this class had: building a website, creating blog posts, updating professional social media accounts, and creating a Wiki page as a group project were all skills we learned by doing.  The knowledge I gained through this experience was far better than if I had to simply read about each platform and write papers on the material.

The group project experience for me was….. challenging.  I had a group of four classmates, and we all came into this Wiki page project with little to no experience using Wiki pages.  We all had to navigate our site and learn how to use the program to create a professional, cohesive site that represented all of our efforts.  Unfortunately, some did not learn the platform well enough.  Some had problems understanding our instructions on what we were meant to do.  We assigned ourselves roles: Content Locators, Graphics, and CDO.  Some in our group did not follow their roles, while others did not contribute the necessary material.  Some content was inaccurate to our topics.  As the CDO, it was my responsibility to ensure our group page was updated with the appropriate content.  I found myself overstepping my role to complete the missing work from my group.

Working in groups is a necessary skill to have as education professionals: we do it every day in our classrooms!  Working with peers in the education field is also a necessary skill.  We simply cannot improve the educational process alone.  We can learn valuable lessons and skills when we collaborate with our professional peers as well as our students.  There are, of course, many times where the people you are collaborating with are not pulling their fair share of work.  I tend to do what I did with my group project: step in and pull the weight of others for the benefit of the project. 

All in all, this experience has helped me tremendously in my group skills.  It is important to recognize what each team member is capable of, to help as much as possible, with the hopes that everyone will pull through and get the job done.  I’m too particular to let necessary work go undone, and in this case, I had several opportunities to communicate our needs professionally and without criticism.  In the end, my group appreciated my efforts and after the first week, stepped up their game.  I think they learned some valuable lessons about working in a group as well.