EDLD 5316 Week 5 Journal Reflection

Welcome to Week 5! This is the closing reflection for this course. It has been an adventure! I have learned so much! My dreams for my students and their education is expanding! I have spoken with my students about citing their sources when creating presentation or writing essays. As a result, they have a base knowledge of plagiarism. However, I have learned so much more about what is and what is not plagiarism and I want to share that with my students. Additionally, I have learned about copywrite laws and how a digital footprint is created. Did you know that there were two forms of a digital footprint? I didn't prior to this class.

For my final project for this course, I had to write a reflective paper. Doesn't that sound like an oxymoron? The majority of the of the reflective paper is more inline with a typical APA formatted paper with cited sources. The end of the paper is a personal reflection on the topic covered in the paper. I decided to write about what I found the most fascinating in this course. I chose to write about digital citizenship and how being a good digital citizen helps the person to create a positive digital footprint. I think that this paper and other resources that I have gathered will be an asset to me as begin to prepare a digital citizenship course for my upper elementary and junior high students.

If I were to reflect upon this class a whole.....Yikes! I would say it is busy! There was so much work to be done throughout the entire course. I literally had something to do almost every day of the week in order to keep up with the assignments. Also, this course is much more structured than I'm used to compared to the other courses that I have taken in the Digital Learning and Leading program from Lamar University. The other courses use the COVA approach toward learning and assignments. Additionally, the placement of this course is odd to me. The information that I learned throughout this course is so beneficial! I would highly suggest that this course be moved to earlier in the program. In fact, I would suggest that EDLD 5316 be the second course in the Digital Learning and Leading program. If I had all of this information earlier, I probably would have gone in a different direction for my innovation plan. Specifically, I would have chosen digital citizenship instead of eportfolios. At De Beau Microschool, technology is not the primary tool. In fact, many parents seek De Beau Microschool out because of the lack of technology. Technology is not introduced until sixth grade, and that just started this academic year. However, I am preparing an introduction course for the upper elementary students in fifth grade. That course will begin with proper typing technique and digital citizenship. Overall, I did enjoy this course.