It’s over.  I am officially finished with my master’s degree.  I can’t believe this is my final assignment.  It feels so sweet!  I have learned so much through the last eighteen months.  Let’s take a walk down memory lane and visit some of the more memorable moments of my journey.

 5302 This was my first course, and I was terrified.  I had not been enrolled in a college course in over ten years!  This was the best introduction course for this program.  I learned about growth mindset which is exactly what I needed at this point in my career, and in my first course in working towards my master’s degree.  I learned the power of the word YET.  I loved it!  We also were introduced to the COVA learning approach which was extremely stressful.  We weren’t given directions on how exactly our assignments were to look, and as a perfectionist, I hated this in the beginning.  It took me a little while to see that it wasn’t about the grade, but more about how I presented my learning.

5303 Then we entered the eportfolio class.  This whole class gave us an entire month to build our eportfolios.  I was so excited about it that my site was built the first week.  I would edit and rework a few things over the next few weeks, but I felt like I had a lot of idle time during this course.  I have loved the eportfolio and fully plan on using it after the program.

5305 This course was the most stressful course I believe of the entire program.  You decide on your innovation plan in this course.  Your decision will follow you throughout the entire program.  My first idea was shot down, and I had no idea what to do.  I was grateful to have Dr. Harapnuik take time to meet with me on a Zoom call to further decide and help me figure out what to do.  This course also includes your first literature review.  This was a challenge.  This course was tough!

5304  Yes, I took 5304 after 5305.  This course was interesting.  We learned about our Why and listened to one of my favorite Ted Talks from the course.  I was introduced to Simon Sinek, and I seriously loved his perspective.  We also read the book, Crucial Conversations, and I learned that there are eight steps involved when having high stakes conversations.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Eight steps seem like a lot, but it all made sense!

5313  This course was all about creating significant learning environments.  We read the book, A New Culture of Learning, and he spoke about how we as teachers do not see ourselves as coaches but more of the teacher that knows it all and you will get all of your information from me.  This course is where I realized that I had been the teacher focused on the activities and not so much the learning outcome.  I learned over and over that the learning has to be the focus.  In this course, I created a course using two different templates and my favorite was the universal design template.

5318 This course consisted of building an online course.  I did not particularly love this course.  We had to use Schoology to create our course, and I did not find it to be very user-friendly for first graders.  I worked especially hard to create items that I found to be appropriate for my students.  I used things such as Nearpods and Quizizzes because these are tools I use daily with my students, and they would feel comfortable with completing independently.  I felt good about my course, but the student that graded it really seemed to have a hard time understanding what a first-grader was capable of.  This was one of my least favorite courses.

5388  This was my favorite course!  I hope to be an instructional technologist one day and this course was centered around professional development.  The reading was my mind blowing.  I learned what effective professional development looked like, and that 90% of professional development is not effective.

5314 This course could be summed up with another literature review.  I felt that some of the literature reviews became repetitive.  It was tough to get the reading done and find great resources to use.  I struggled through every literature review we were assigned.  I struggle with APA and academic writing.  My writing seems to be very conversational.  I always cringed when I saw a literature review assigned.

5315  Another literature review for this course and we learned about action research.  I enjoyed the idea behind action research.  I felt like it was tough to really get through action research during the summer and implement it.  I went back to school the next month, and action research was far from my brain with starting the year.  I struggled again through the literature review.  I was grateful to survive the last literature review of the program!

5317  Dr. T was back to instruct this course, and I was so excited.  She is so patient.  I really enjoyed her.  This course was all about writing an article to be published.  I never imagined myself writing an article for publication!  I emailed Dr. T multiple times to work on different parts of the article.  I was so proud of the end result, and I am actually being published in a few days on the TCEA Tech Notes blog!  I don’t think I could have ever seen that coming to fruition!

5316 Welcome to nothing COVA related!  This course was all about digital citizenship.  I felt like we were being punished in this course!  What happened to choice and voice?  It was extremely worksheet heavy.  I had to even reflect on the web recording each week.  It just felt like a bunch of busy work.  I enjoyed creating a brand at the end of the course.  What I learned through the COVA approach was that I really enjoyed having the choice to use whatever I wanted to share my learning.  This course was all about writing a reflection instead of creating.  I missed COVA!

5320 I’m finished! Dr. Harapnuik was back, and I was thrilled again.  This course was a reflection of everything to this point.  I loved reliving what I had learned and where I started.  I can’t believe all of the things I accomplished during these eighteen months.  I’m kind of sad it’s over, but I am so proud!  I did it!

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Random House.

Patterson, Kerry. (Eds.) (2012) Crucial conversations :tools for talking when stakes are high New York : McGraw-Hill.

Thomas, Douglas,Brown, John Seely. (2011) A new culture of learning :cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change

Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.