Final Reflection on this Course & Final Project

When I was first married my husband and I were discussing having children. I mentioned that I thought we should wait for the “right time”, while he pointed out that often the “right time” never arrives. He had a point, many times, if you keep waiting for the “right time”, you just keep on waiting. This course has helped me realize that there is no “right time” to use technology in the classroom. If you keep waiting for the “right time” or until you “know everything” about technology, your students will never benefit from technology. Two things I’ve realized during this last course about using technology in the classroom:

• Don’t wait; sometimes you just have to jump in there.
• No matter how much I’ve learned about technology, I keep realizing how much I don’t know about technology.

So Susan Chubb and I “jumped right in” and had the students create imovies about their experiences with stress. (This was a really big jump for me since I’m not a Mac user!) On her blog, Susan does a great job explaining the background of the project and our project page provides even more details). For this project, we kept the content simple, yet meaningful and essentially students had to show:

1. What stress is for you, a middle school student
a. Show examples of things that cause you stress
2. What happens when you are stressed?
a. How do you react, for example, you forget things, get sick, don’t sleep, get angry...
3. What can you do to help your stress? What do you do?
a. For example: exercise, get a massage, read a book…

In addition, they had to define stress, tell when stress becomes a serious problem and what can be done about it. The imovies are short, between :45 seconds and 2:00 minutes in length.

The students did have a lot of fun creating these and have seemed to learn a lot. My students were able to use all of the technology (cameras, software) without too much trouble. If a student had a question that I couldn’t answer, then another student was able to answer it. We’ll find out on Monday what the students think of the project when we’ll hold the class film festival and then write a reflection about the content, process and outcome of their projects.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/funka/2559860826/