Final Reflection on Experience of Creating Final Project

Working on the final project with Barb (Barbara Kalis) was as always a creative, energizing and rewarding experience. Barb and I have worked together for 11 years now in the same department (HS ESL at ISB), and for 8 years as co-teachers in EAP 9 (1998-2006). We soon got to know each other well as teachers (our individual strengths and weaknesses, backgrounds, values and beliefs) and realized as teachers we complemented each other like yin and yang. She is holistic; I am analytical. Basically, she sees the big picture; I see the details. Or according to Bloom's new taxonomy, she usually 'creates' and 'applies' while I 'evaluate' and 'analyze'. We both remember! So all together that covers Bloom's six facets of understanding. We complement each other even in our education backgrounds. Outside of our shared background in ESL, her early training was in reading and literature while mine was in biological anthropology and the study of human evolution. Over the years we have taken many of the same courses together and throughout these courses have enjoyed extending are collaborative partnership outside of the classroom through these courses but then bringing our learning back to the classroom and sharing our new knowledge, skils, understandings and perspectives with the other HS ESL teachers.

Our final project for this course, the Metamorphosis Project, is a multimedia personal narrative communicating a student's personal metamorphosis with the use of symbolic language, metaphor, or motif that connects to one of the universal themes found in Kafta's Metamorphosis, which the ELW 3 students read as a graphic novel. Although I do not teach ELW 3 (advanced level students), I hope to adapt the project to my ELW 1 (beginning ESL students) class curricular and students and share what I learned about the project with my current co-teacher for EAP 10 and ELW 1, Karen Rosenbaum, who was unable to take this course.

For my final reflection on the course, I've pasted my answers to the survey of Feb. 28 below...

What was done well...
Introducing us to the world of possibilities -- the set of tools currently (and in the future) that we can (could) use to support our students' learning experiences and our own professional development.

What could be improved?
The pace of the course was fast in terms of the amount of reading and the number of technological tools introduced. I know a little about a lot of the tools but not a lot about one of the tools introduced.

What have you learned?
That technology is not just about supporting classroom learning but about breaking down the walls of the classroom and allowing students to learn from the entire wired community of learners and that effectively entering this wired world of learning is a two-way street. You get out of it what you put into it. As with any relationship, there is joint responsibility and expected reciprocity for the effectiveness of online communication and collaboration .

What are you still wondering about?
How this will all impact my students' learning and my own professional development. I need time to reflect and synthesize and integrate all I have learned into my own and my students' learning experiences.

Any other feedback?
Looking forward to course # 2. Thanks Kim and Jeff for your patience, time, caring and hard work!

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