Portfolio Cover Page

In it, you're asked to reflect on the work completed over the semester (readings: Gee's book, the articles on teaching writing, Harvey's book; compositions: your digital document, your blogs, your wikis, your memo, your assignment sequence), and think about that work's utility for the future. What have you learned about yourself as a learner, a reader, and a writer from the work you did in class? What ideas from the work done in class do you want to remember when you find yourself teaching writing to your own students?

Overall I have very much enjoyed this semester of class. When I started off with Gee's readings I was a bit lost but as I read more I was able to understand his writings much more. The idea of video games was a very interesting topic to me because in High School I had to do a presentation on the affects of violence in video games on children today. In my research I had come across arguments that said video games were beneficial teaching tools for students to learn from so I was interested to read about Gee's opinions on this subject.
The articles on the teaching of writing were very beneficial to read as someone wanting to become a teacher. I believe the most important thing that I took from all of those articles was that as a teacher you need to put yourself into the students shoes. As a teacher you should be doing the project with them sharing triumphs and struggles with them. Doing this allows you to have a better understanding of your students problems with the projects as well as their successes.
In this class I believe I have definitely furthered my knowledge when it comes to different technological aspects of learning. The digital document video is something I would have never thought to do as a teacher but now after doing it I think it is a great creative way for students to present projects. Also I never have done any blogging or anything remotely like it. I believe if I went into a higher level of teaching than elementary school blogging is something I would think about introducing to my students.
Out of all the assignments we have done in this class I believed I took away the most from the sequence assignment. Making a lesson plan is not an easy task and I believe this project showed us how much work we will have to put into each assignment we do for our class. I have looked at the standards in many of my other classes but looking at them and trying to incorporate them into a lesson plan you came up with was something new to me. This project taught me a lot about how I will want to organize myself and the way I plan on teaching in the future.

Reflection of Memo Project

The readings for the memo project were very interesting to read. I liked reading about the different ideas in approaching the teachings of writing. After reading it was difficult to decide which things that I read about that I would address in my memo. Reading through the statements that our groups and others wrote after reading the articles I narrowed my memo down to a couple different main ideas that I thought were the most important in the teaching of writing.
The actual writing about the different approaches to the teaching of writing was not very difficult to me. The most challenging part of the memo project was deciding how exactly I wanted to organize my thoughts and suggestions to the principal within my memo. After deciding on my organization my memo game together much quicker than I thought but it took me a long time to finalize how I wanted to organize my thought in a professional manner to present to a principal.

Inquiry About Writing

So far after reading my articles I have had different feelings after reading each article. While reading the first article I felt very lost because I did not feel I was following what Gunther Kress was saying. I knew he was addressing the idea of genres and made a claim saying that if a student does not understand the genre of something they will not understand the assignment. After talking with my fellow set three members I was able to better understand why he made such a big point of understanding the genre of something. The genre is the background, for example if you do not know a dictionary is for looking up words and you just think it is a book you would start by reading it at the very beginning which we all know is not what you should do when looking at a dictionary.
Overall my favorite article so far has been article three. The claims that Judith M. Jester made about teaching writing were all very good points that I agreeed with. This is an article that I plan on holding on to, to remind me about how I would have liked to been taught in a writing setting and give my students that opportunity. One of the main points she addressed was that as a teacher you should be going through the same struggles as your students because this allows you to relate to the problems and successes they are having. Also I believe this allows the students to appreciate your feedback more because they know you are going through the same problem as they are and that you truly can relate to them. For example I thought it was very cool how Professor Kittle did a digital document as well as all of us because he could tell us about problems and successes he was having with his video which could help us avoid problems he was having or join in his success.

Final Digital Video Project

My digital video was Salad Dressing 101, I spoke about how I am learning to make my own homemade salad dressing. This project was very rewarding for me once it was complete but at times very frustrating because of the labor that went into it. I took many pictures off of Google images to represent the items I was talking about using to make my homemade salad dressings. I felt that the affinity group I was a part of and speaking to was all those people who are learning how to do new things in the kitchen. This is why I chose to to pictures for each ingredient as I talked about them because I thought that could help anyone who would be in my affinity group trying to learn, or now wanting to learn how to make their own homemade salad dressing. I did not mention Gee specifically because I thought that make take away from from video and seem like I just stuck it in there to put it there. Although I did not mention it directly I thought how me trying to pass my learned skill onto my friends would be a good example of dispersed knowledge because I am sharing my new found knowledge with others therefore that knowledge is be dispersed over a larger group of people. Also I thought of my boyfriend when thinking about the distributed property because he is teaching me his knowledge.
I touched a lot on how my boyfriend is the one who is teaching me how to make the salad dressing because I thought that this would not only encourage people to want to learn how to make their own but also possibly encourage people who know how to make salad dressing to share their knowledge with others like my boyfriend has with me.

Video Project

At first I was very intimidated by this project but as I have gotten more familiar with the movie maker program I have enjoyed making the project more and more. I think the program is very user friendly, it is amazing to me how easy it is to but your own little homemade movie together. I am glad I learned about this program because I am sure I will use it now for future projects I need to do. One of the problems I have been encountering is that I haven't been able to make my narrative very long. Also I feel that it will be hard to keep the audiences attention so I have tried to had some humor into my narrative to keep the audiences attention. Overall I am feeling a lot better about this project than I had at the start and I am very happy with the progress I have made with my project.

Learning in Action

I believe that it is easier for children today to learn through video games because they are interactive and when performing actions it engages their minds. We all know that we were much more interested in learning games such as four square for during recess time when we were little than the capitals of the United States. Children can remember rules to games better than memorizing things such as presidents because when learning rules to a game they have a visual that pops up in their head to help them remember where as learning things in class many times is just reading something and being able to spit it back out for a test. In video games children can remember certain moves because not only is their body used to memorizing the certain movements of their hands but also they have a picture in their head and on their screen to know what they are doing.

Situated Learning

One part at the beginning of Chapter 4 that stuck out in my mind was where it said, "This editing process helps them structure the ways in which they pay attention to their experiences, foregrounding some things in them and backgrounding others." This particular statement stood out to me because I agree completely with the idea that people all have their different ways of remembering things. Also some people will remember certain things in detail about a certain situation where others will remember something completely different. I know that personally I remember things when I put them in a certain order in my head whereas my boyfriend can just look at things the way they are and remember them without having to think of a special order to remember them in.