Putting My Learning To Work

I've sort of lost count, but I think we just completed the third week of our program.  I have adjusted to my new schedule pretty well, and am getting used to functioning on less sleep.  Honestly, though, when my alarm goes off at dark-thirty am, I really don't mind getting up to jump into my schoolwork (as long as I remembered to set the coffee on automatic brew before I went to bed ...ZzZzZz...).  What we are learning in Edl 621 and in Edl 630 is completely engaging.  Not only that, but I am putting my learning into practice daily at Vista Visions Academy with my students.  Three weeks in and I'm already doing things differently in my profession.

This week in my creative writing course we stopped, dropped, and created student blogs so that my students can share their beautiful work with a larger audience than just me.  My students are having fun creating their pages and personalizing their sites.  While I was at it, I created a Weebly site for my school's literary and creative arts magazine.  We are a K-12 school, so I plan to collect writing, artwork, and music audio files and videos from our music classes for all the grade levels and upload them to the site.  I really like this platform because it can be updated regularly, and we can include more than just text and still images.  I plan to highlight a featured student or teacher artist each month on a blog on the magazine site as well.  There is no artwork up yet, we haven't named the magazine yet, and I need to get rid of the stock images that came with the site, but that will happen next week.  I also drafted a letter of parent permission for my students to submit some of their creative writing pieces to the "Reader's Write" section of The Sun magazine, which is a really cool art publication that I subscribe to.  So that is pretty exciting.  I'm eager to observe the experience my students have taking their work "live" to a real audience on the internet.  I drafted some blogging guidelines for them as well, to help make it a smooth transition in our course.

So far I'm not having any troubles with our coursework.  Just enjoying it and doing my best to stay up with our assignments.  Ready for the next project!

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