This week I have had some bad experiences in my EDU 271 Educational Technology class. I feel like this class is an information overload at the moment. I do not understand the whole wiki thing. On top of having to deal with some information that I have never experienced before, I have to be put in a group to work on it.
Now that I go that off my chest, I can express what I can learn from this experience. First I am learning how to work with wiki. I also understand my teacher’s instructions a little better. I also am learning how to communicate with my group members a little more. (Well 1 group member anyway)
I believe what made this week kind of difficult for me was first my lack of interest in wiki. I understand it’s important, but not understand the site made me kind of shy away from it. Something else that contributed to my difficult week was the group assignment. I, like many others, don’t like group assignments. I feel there is always that one (or more) person that doesn’t pull his/her own weight. They solely rely on their team members to pull them through the assignment.
I hope this was just my one bad week for the semester and that the rest will fly by like so many have before. Thanks for letting me get some of my difficulties off my chest. It’s kind of a stress releaser, to blog about my bad week. Thinking about my problems also helps me figure out how I can go back and try to fix the things I didn’t understand before.
I completely agree about the information overload. I feel like I'm drowning in all the information and work being thrown at us, not just this week, but the entire semester so far. I'm hoping that once we get the grades and feedback from the past few weeks, I'll have a better understanding of what is expected of us. Right now it feels kind of like I'm fishing in the dark, hoping I'm doing everything right.
ReplyDeleteI also understand where you're coming from on the group thing. I think that's one reason why it's important to her that we communicate with our wiki group members in a way she can see and judge personal contribution on. When I use groups with my own students, I know I'm definitely going to check in with groups consistently and have them do peer evaluations at the end. That way they know from the beginning that not only does the work they did as a group count towards their grade, but also how they each contributed to the work.
Hang in there, if we all keep paddling we might survive this ordeal.
ReplyDeleteIt is alot of work, isn't it. This is def. the most work I have had with an online class before. But like Butch says we got to hang in there! I'm sure we can all survive and pass the class.
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