We're moving in the right direction

We are moving in the right direction:

We came up just short again last night. I hate it for our athletes, I hate it for our Cardinal fans, and I hate it for our hard working coaching staff. This was the second conference game for us, and the second conference loss. I can tell you from the experience this year, my ability to keep my Growth Mindset front and center has been tested. The feeling of failure is never good and it starts to wear on you. Being in situations where you had a chance to win, and come up short in the last minute 2 weeks in a row can be very disheartening. As our head coach says we must stay the course and trust the process day after day. I truly believe that we are using the growth mindset within the process day in and day out.

As this course comes to an end:

While I have missed the opportunity to “meet” with my classmates during the Tuesday evening class, I have enjoyed getting to catch up by listening to the session later in the week. My intent at the beginning of this course was to transition my ePortfolio from Google Sites to Word Press. After listening to Dr. Reed talk about her affinity for Google Sites, and the fact that trying to learn a more complex program at the beginning of football season would be tough, I have opted for overhauling the site I created for our EDLD 5302 course. There are some changes I am making to transition my current ePortfolio, but as I continue to evolve in my thinking through our current course, I look forward to learning Word Press at the end of Lamar’s football season so I can make a permanent move. I am looking forward to having the ability to be able to receive comments on my page. I looked at so many ePortfolios in Dr. H’s class prior to completing our first one, that I am comfortable knowing that there is no single “right” way.

As I listened to Tuesday’s meeting, several things came to mind. As a current college football coach at Lamar, I have several audiences. As I consider my current student athletes, I hope to have an ePortfolio that will motivate them to create their own. Some have hopes of trying to make it at the next level in football, but all aspire to have a professional career of some type. An ePortfolio would allow them to not only highlight their academic successes, but also their athletic successes. Giving future employers an opportunity to see how they have managed participating on a team while successfully completing a degree is a selling point in the job market. Having the chance to highlight the lessons learned by working together on a team, through highs and lows, for the greater good of a team is also a positive.

While listening to many of you talk about high school students and their ePortfolios, I thought about the benefit of high school student athletes that aspire to become a scholarship athlete in any sport. Regardless of the collegiate level sport, college coaches spend a lot of time researching and recruiting college athletes. As we all know, college tuition, books, room and board are expensive. If coaches were able to look at a high school student’s ePortfolio that highlighted not only their athletic successes, but also their academic successes, they might be more confident offering a scholarship. Colleges and Universities are investing in high school graduates. If a student athlete is not serious about working as hard academically as they are about working hard athletically, it’s a bad investment.

I will sit down Sunday after football meetings and pull all of my notes and thoughts together, and begin to copy and paste all of my blogs to my ePortfolio. I will keep tweaking until the deadline, and then I will think about the things that I should have tweaked. The thing that I like most about the ePortfolio is that that is just fine. Because I own it, I can tweak anytime the mood hits me.