Deep Breaths

After going to bed last night I realized that I have probably posted the whinyest post ever. See I can explain. For the last couple weeks I have been trying to teach 61 sophomores who are refusing to learn. It's highly frustrating and takes up a disproportionate amount of time. For example, I spent the weekend grading tests where I was desperately trying to give as much partial credit as I could. If I hadn't pulled the questions right from their homework, I would question whether my test was too tricky.

Then, while the instructer says that we should have known to be formulating a portfolio of our class work throughout the course, I must not have seen that directive. In theory that's a good idea, except that we had something due almost every Sunday at midnight and frequently the directions on how to do them were incomplete. For example, the portfolio due last night had a link to the website of a woman who develops portfolios. I didn't see a link anywhere on there on HOW to make a portfolio. I'm sure portfolios are useful to someone, but that doesn't help when I'm trying to make one.

So in the frantic few minutes before midnight last night I let some of my frustration leak into my post. I'm sorry.

As to this class, I really didn't learn that much. Perhaps I started at a higher level than most. I was already blogging. I've done tons of power point presentations. I've planned my wedding in excel. I've done extensive work in Word. I may have picked up a finer point, but overall, there was very little new.

Although I did like the video.

Finally it's Almost Over

This has been a difficult semester. Substituting full time and taking 4 graduate classes is exhausting. Finally I am finishing up though. Unfortunately, I'm a little rushed. See, I'm making lesson plans and working on end of the semester Power Point presentations for my other classes and my job and then to top it off, I have to spend time searching online help to figure out how to link to a word file. It seems to me that might be something helpful to include in the instructions for the online class. But what do I know? I'm just the student. And here I am trying to get this done by midnight when its due.

And I'm teaching seven classes of history tomorrow. So not much sleep for me tonight. I'm overextended and frustrated.

I did learn some important things in this class. I learned how to make a webquest. And I learned how to make a website. And my electronic portfolio may come in handy (but I'm sorta doubtful). But I do think that now that I know how to make a video and upload it to Teacher Tube, that I probably will do it again. Good thing my stepdad could answer my questions and help me when I ran into trouble!

Check it out. I'm pretty proud of it.