My Personal Reflection:

It's been a year now and I can look back thinking 'WOW! I've made it and I am much more knowledgeable from this entire experience!' There have been so many unexpected turns and twists in this class and it has been a challenge to get everything working together. I know that because of all of the personal and group projects, independent study, in-depth research, and personal reflection we have learned much more than anyone probably expected or even wanted. The entire experience has been, for lack of a better word, enlightening. I honestly feel that most of us have a much higher level of expectation for our students as well as ourselves now that we have completed this program.

The observation process was definitely an eye-opener. Because I was able to watch an entire day's workshop, I was able to see how the teacher had structured a full day's Flash MX training. There were a lot of positive concepts that I was able to take back with me about teaching multimedia and web mastering concepts like basic animation, sound integration, basic action scripts and image usage in Flash MX. I also believe that the use of step-by-step handouts was useful for those who may have forgotten the entire process by the end of the class.

Although there were positives in the observation, I did walk away with several negative feelings about the entire workshop. The teacher's handouts were obviously not her own but she did take credit for them and this was a contributing factor to her loss of respect from her students. She did not stress concepts like image optimization or the introduction of the simple parts of the screen for beginners to grasp or understand. Because of these points it was hard to give the teacher a glowing review and I was able to see errors that I would like to make sure not to repeat in my teaching. I would like to always provide for all learning levels and abilities.

Standards I-V are the skills that we definitely take for granted. (Standard I) Most of us, including myself, tend to use technology related terms, concepts, data input strategies in our everyday teaching and we don't think twice about it. This is definitely an area that we are probably the strongest in.

(Standard II) We are able to provide rubrics and grading scales to help the students identify task requirements, we teach appropriate search strategies and always hope that we are able to provide the students access to the best technology to gain the most knowledge. Although this may be the case, through the research of this standard, we were able to investigate and incorporate more rubrics and survey standards for our students and ourselves to utilize.

(Standard III) We help the students to synthesize, analyze and evaluate information for themselves and we have been able to communicate more about our concepts when it comes to group activies. Through the TATC program, we were forced to work in groups to prepare products which put us in the participant seat (just like our students). I think that we were able to reasses the value of these activities and to see the need for boundaries and role assignments. We were also able to learn and apply new strategies to help synthesize, analyze and evaluate our students.

(Standard IV) This standard is an area that I definitely grew a great deal in because we tend to never take into consideration the diverse audiences that may access our information on the Internet. Through the use of ALT tags, the Bobby Test and other specific file types (Rich Text Format, PDFs and specific image file types), we were able to test and produce web pages as well as files that were accessible to many, if not most, of the public with access to the Internet.

(Standard V) This standard has been especially useful to all of us because we have been able to prepare, produce and present full units to our classmates that would provide students and teachers with complete lessons including worksheets, activities, tutorials and keys. These units have proven to be very lengthy and difficult to produce but entirely worthwhile and a fantastic resource we have been offered by each other through this program.

Our foundations course was the first course that we dealt with. It covered several standards because it required us to research, analyze, synthesize and produce products that would help us to 'see' the structure and concepts of design that we were going to use throughout the course. I was amazed at how little I knew about art, design and structure before we took this class. Afterwards I was always looking for the concepts to be reinforced throughout the rest of the courses and, just as expected, they were.

Standard VII: Desktop Publishing
This is an area that I was not timid in. Desktop Publishing has always been a passion of mine, but this class helped me to see that the concepts that I felt overwhelmed with could be broken down into the simple concepts as illustrated in the book The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. Because of this required reading, I was able to incorporate more specific concepts to my teaching. I was thrilled to be able to provide lessons based on this book and I am still thrilled that this is something that can be applied to many different areas of design. I feel that I effectively completed this standard through the research and preparation of our activities. I plan to continue my search for great examples of lessons to reinforce these concepts and to prepare my own units to increase my resources.

Standard VIII: Digital Graphics and Animation
This is another area that I feel particularly strong in. The use of Macromedia's Flash is one of my favorite topics to teach and I found it a great outlet to prepare my own projects and examples for my students. I especially felt that the in-depth information about digital graphics is extremely useful to me because this area has many important concepts to teach. I plan to gain more knowledge and prepare more lessons about digital graphics. I definitely want to learn more about GIF animation to be able to teach it more effectively.

Standard IX: Multimedia
Multimedia is an area that I had no idea I could easily grasp the concepts and applications in. I found myself swimming in the capturing and editing of video and sound as well as the incorporation of these tools into multimedia presentations which overlapped with the digital graphics and animation concepts learned in the earlier standard. It was easy to see how everything fit together and worked well when activities were structured and prepared for the learner. I felt secure that the standard was well-prepared and that I met it's requirements easily in the activities and products that I produced. In the future I plan to continue to research and incorporate more complex concepts in multimedia into my learning and teaching. I hope to be able to include more of the activities and concepts from the resource books my school district has purchased for me (as soon as I get the chance to look over them).

Standard X: Video Technology
This was by far the standard that I was the weakest in. I had no idea what we were getting into when we started the class but I feared that I was going to have to handle a video camera even though I had no previous experience even using one. I also feared that we were going to have to use video editing software even though the only one I had some experience with was Video Wave and that was only from the Vision IT class. This is not to say that Rachel Newman was not an incredible teacher but I felt overwhelmed because that was a one day class on the subject and we were going to prepare very lengthy projects. After going to class offerings on the video editing software and camera usage, as well as investigating the software on my own, I was able to complete the standard requirements and prepare the products as required. I felt confident that our group project and my personal project were excellent reflections of the skills we learned to incorporate. Overall, I am very proud of the work that we prepared in this class and I expect to spend a lot more time investigating new camera and editing techniques to prepare my students for video creation.

Standard XI: Web Mastering
This is an area that I felt comfortable in and was positive that all the standards requirements would be met easily. It's easy to see just by looking over the matrix that most of the activities that we prepared utilized many concepts in the web mastering standard. This is an area that encompasses so many others because there is a lot of design concepts, color mixing, structure planning and preparation as well as accessibility concerns to diverse populations. I knew several years ago when I taught my first group of Web Designing students that there were much more concepts than I could provide for them at the time and even now, having completed the class, I still feel the same way. My main desire, above all of the others listed previously, is to grow the most in the area of web mastering because this is an ever-changing and expanding area of study. I definitely want to grow quickly and accurately in this area.

The TATC program has been a blessing and a curse both at the same time. We had to find time when there was none. We had to prepare full units for lessons even though we may have been teaching other topics in our classes which doubled our work load. We had to meet deadlines that sometimes matched our school deadlines and we had to find the will to work even when we were on 'vacation.' Although this may have been the case, it has been an intense period of growth that I wouldn't trade for a world of resource books. The activities, the feedback from teachers, the threaded discussions with our classmates--all of this has made us more well-rounded and grounded in the area of Technology Applications.