Gustavo's Blog post

On this page you are going to see how was this last semester by my eyes, seeing what I learned, my struggles, and my hopes for the future.

I hope you enjoy reading it!

My final Challenge

Right before the beginning of the second semester, I was quite excited, because I had a great first semester and since I was just studying at that moment those vacation days started to pass real slowly and I couldn’t wait for the classes to return to study the new disciplines. Now all I can say is that I am looking forward to lay-off again preparing myself for the next semester and continuing my journey.

Focusing now on the second semester itself (not on the so wished vacation) I can say it was very interesting and filtering it to our discipline here, it was pretty valuable in terms of opening my mind. Sometimes I tend to reflect upon the internet and think that there are no rules or guidance to use it. Normally people just take a smartphone or notebook and start to discover this vast place by themselves, but this discovery in the major number of people finish very soon, and this is where the first text we talked about this semester, by Gavin Dudeney, Nicky Hockly and Mark Pegrum, helped me understand the teachers' role in this equation, by showing that internet has almost infinite possibilities and it has to be explored by students if they want to fit in the world nowadays, a place which requests on top everything the ability of creativeness. Considering this and my role as a future teacher, someone whose responsibility lays on guiding the students to reach their full potential, I got to be able to adapt myself and learn what technologies are most relevant from time to time and step ahead, because as Buckingham said, I need to understand the media I want to use and evaluate it properly to know what's best for my future students. I have no doubt I will use these concepts and others we have seen not just in the other course disciplines and my future job, but in my life in general.

Now, letting aside the topics we discussed in all these weeks, and thinking about the semester as a whole, it was exhausting. It’s almost a cliché now talking about the way remote study can make us feel extremely tired, but it is true. With everything going on with our country, the world… making us feel worried about the outbreak situation, it is something we just can’t turn off and it certainly affects our work. Therefore, not just in this class but the others too I recognize a had fall in my performance compared to the first semester. It was pretty tough trying to read something or watch classes in Google Meet with all the anxiety and the desire for things to change, even though I could enjoy the content and the interaction with my colleagues (at least the little interaction remote study gives us).

I am not a real great fan of group work so that is a small issue I had, but as a future teacher I know the importance of it and I will use it for sure in my classes, and believe it or not, the activity I liked the most doing this semester in our classes is probably this one, because I just love writing, and right now, while I am finishing this text, I am having a lot more fun than it is supposed to someone who is doing a self-evaluation task to have.

So, to say my final words here, I think a deserve a medium grade, at least a 7 because as I wrote before, I know that a could have done it better, but like many other colleagues of mine and UFSM students, I just want things to become normal again, to give some hope and motivation for us and to prove that all of it is, in fact, real and there is a future ahead with possibilities that just depends on us.