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.