Contributing to my learning & community 5303 & 5313

Contributing to My Learning & Community

5303 & 5313

As I continue my journey through the MED program I will analyze my learning journey through my strengths, weaknesses, and contributions. I feel that self-assessment is crucial in all aspects of life to evaluate growth.

 My self-assessment is:

• Course 5303-96

• Course 5313-94

My main learning community for 5303 consisted of: Samara Marin, Anna Gonzalez, and Amburh Jernigan.

My main learning community for 5313 consisted of: Samara Marin, Anna Gonzalez, Amburh Jernigan, Maria Montemayor, and Mia Fayerweather. 

I met all key and supporting contributions in each course. I showed leadership skills by organizing a teams group for both courses, emailed everyone as soon as the courses opened to let them know groups had been created to help with collaboration and attached a link to the group in the email. I also posted the same message and link in the student lounge part of the discussions to make sure everyone was notified and had the opportunity to join. I also organized a zoom call for collaboration as well. 

I contributed to my learning and the learning of my classmates by participating in all activities. These 8 weeks my schedule was pretty hectic, and I wasn’t able to make most of the live meetings. This is something that I could try and do better in the next set of classes. I saw on the recordings that some people joined on their phones and that is something I didn’t think to do. I always try to be home so I can sit and focus to write notes when I am in the zooms or listening to them. Although I know the zooms are not required, I made sure I went back and watched all the recorded videos for every meeting. I like the meetings because they are helpful to answer questions that we all might be wondering. I made sure to remind others in class in the teams group that I organized for both courses that they are available to watch, and I encouraged them to go back and listen to them. I also pointed out things that were discussed in the meetings when questions arose. 

I was active with contributions in the various course forums and tried to make sure I posted in a timely fashion so others could respond to my posting. I made sure to go back and look for responses to discussion posts that I made, as well as emails, chats, and team pages I was part of. Sometimes other classmates got on quicker and were able to answer questions before I did. I usually keep my notifications silenced so there are not any distractions when I am in class. So, I don’t get to check them until after I am home the majority of the time. This is also something that I can work on and change in the next courses. I can ensure that I keep my notifications on. This way I will hear when someone posts, and I can check it really quick or make a small note to check it during lunch, enrichment, or conference time so that whoever has posted or asked a question gets a response quicker. I continued to ensure that I used the APA format and cited references in my work and in my discussion posts. I also tried to leave feedforward to help my classmates with their learning process and pointed out anything crucial they missed or left out of an assignment when I noticed. I also reviewed other students’ assignments and helped make suggestions and fixed grammatical errors. 

Within our groups we were able to voice any concerns about assignments and ePortfolios. Both also left comments and suggestions on assignments, such as a new culture of learning, learning philosophy, our  3-column chart, uBd, revisiting growth mindset and our check-in post which I reviewed and revised before submitting. We shared our portfolios and discussed ideas and suggestions with each other. All of my discussion posts, responses, and assignments were turned in on time or early. I completed all the course readings, videos, and supporting resources in both courses. This helped ensure I completed blogs and assignments with the correct background knowledge. I made sure to look at all feedback left on my assignments from the instructors and went back and made corrections to all in text citations and other modifications/corrections that were suggested. However, there is one part that I didn’t correct and that was my annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography is a brief account of information given on a site. I feel like I did this with what I had submitted the first time, and there were no specifics given on how to elaborate in this area when grading and feedback was given. I could work on this and reached out to the instructor asking for more specific instructions and feedback so that I could correct all errors made. 

Being able to collaborate with classmates in these courses was beneficial because everything we did, we put on our ePortfolios. Everything we do in this program will be put on our portfolios to showcase our learning at the end. So, in turn collaborating with each other on our assignments and portfolios helps us all truly embrace our learning experiences. We are able to have a voice when creating our assignments and portfolios, but we are also able to step back, look at others' work, and self-reflect. Have we shown our passions or missed the big picture? There are so many ideas we can gain from viewing others' portfolios and assignments that could spark something new inside of ourselves and guide us in a different direction when it comes to our own work. We are building upon ourselves and helping others by building them up and helping them find their voice as well.