My Personal Blog
Welcome to my personal blog for my MALDT journey. This blog will document my experience and personal feelings towards the assignments and activities throughout the course of the entire Masters until I finish in December of 2022.
Welcome to my personal blog for my MALDT journey. This blog will document my experience and personal feelings towards the assignments and activities throughout the course of the entire Masters until I finish in December of 2022.
After feeling a bit apprehensive about starting a masters, I decided to finally take the plunge and do it. I've never liked school. I never did well when I was a kid (mostly cause I didn't like it), and only looked at school as a means to an end. I personally wasn't too excited about a Masters, simply because what I do is so specialised and I had the impression that the majority of what would be taught in a Masters of Ed would be really dry and unrelated to my interests. But that changed when I learned about the MALDT.
One of the things that excited me was the connection with ISTE. Since the ISTE cert. is so highly sought after these days, for better or for worse, I knew having gone through a program that helps me become ISTE certified would be very beneficial. Additionally, after browsing the course list, it seemed a little more inline with my interests, rather than classes that would probably be mind-numbingly boring. And on top of that, being that I could get in at half price, that was a huge bonus and probably was a clincher.
We'll see how I actually like the programme as the weeks go on.
It's now been a couple of weeks since my first class with the program has started (EDU590), and I am feeling overall quite positive with the program. My biggest fear was that the content would feel like "busy work" and just have a bunch of readings for the sake of having readings, but luckily, I haven't felt that yet. I actually have been feeling quite positive about what we're learning and have enjoyed it so far. I'll admit, it has been a bit of a struggle to juggle everything else going on with me right now with work and my personal hobbies, but I'm slowly getting into the routine and getting used to it.
I'm the type of person to have a bunch of "side hustles" and this program has forced me to put all of those on hold. For example, creating educational content for my YouTube channel, and taking the time to learn new things (right now I'm learning After Effects - a software package for creating visual effects and animations). So I've had to stop a lot of that, but I think once I get more used to everything I'll be able to pick up some of those passion projects once again.
Although, once we get to August everything's gonna change, since I'm starting at a new school and I'll have to reassess everything again.
I'll be taking it one day at a time.
Another week has gone by and this week seemed a bit busier than the others. We had our by-weekly call this week, which was at 7am for me here in Hong Kong, and I was happy I showed up. These calls have been helpful for keeping me on track. I often consider just watching the playback later, but from experience, I think my attention isn't as high when it's just a playback. So I've been making an effort to attend live, regardless of the logistical difficulties.
This week we had something due Monday, and two things due Friday, which seemed a bit nerve-racking, but I tend to overthink things and possibly obsess over making things perfect so I'm still finding the right balance for my assignments. Next week we have a collaboration activity, which I will not be doing with anyone else in my program, rather, a colleague here in HK, simply due to the logistical nightmare it would be to collaborate with someone who's 12h behind me.
My general feeling for the course has still been pretty high. And I'm feeling pretty positive about what we're learning and the effect it'll have on my practice. I occasionally feel that some of the activities aren't very challenging for me, and since we have a lot of choice in our activities, I have been opting out of those less challenging ones and looking for ones that would be most beneficial for my learning.
Welp, I just submitted my final assignment and overall feel pretty good about the course. In the beginning I think I spent WAY too much time on my assignments and as I read the descriptions where Dr. Roberts outlined the amount of time I should be spending on each assignment, I thought there was no way I could complete them with the same level of quality. However, I have since received almost perfect on everything I've submitted (with the exception of 2 marks off for APA errors) so I think I can maybe learn from this and pull back a bit as I move forward. Though I expect at the beginning of each new class I will likely ramp it back up a bit just because all profs are likely to grade differently.
Overall I've enjoyed the course and getting an intro to the ISTE standards and this course has made me excited about what is to come.
1 down, 9 to go! Bring on 642!!!
Well I've finished my first 2 weeks in EDU 642 and so far find it rather interesting. I really appreciate the ability to make stuff that I can use in my practice - I've already finished 3 pieces of work that can be used this coming year.
So far all the topics seem interesting and not just busy work. And the workload doesn't seem too strenuous. My only wishes were for the course content to be laid out on a google site, like in 590, and there to be a clear deadline list outlined in the syllabus that I can follow along with. In 590 there was a chart with a list of assignments and due dates for each, which I haven't seen so far in everything my current instructor has shared. I ended up screen shot'ing the deadline chart and keeping in on my phone and going back after I finished something to cross it off. It was really convenient. Oh well! One other thing I don't like is that my prof said "no self plagiarism," meaning we can't reuse things we had made in the past. Since I typically have TONS of content in a variety of similar topics, I feel I should be able to use this to display my competency in a given topic where possible.
Other than those little issues, no major problems and I feel positive about the rest of the course.
See you in the next blog post!
Well, it's almost the end of July and the end of 642. So far the topics in 642 have been really interesting and mostly familiar. One of the topics that was fairly new to me was computational thinking, however, almost everything else has been something I've already at least "dabbled" with, if not had a lot of experience with already.
This month was summer, but was extraordinarily busy for me as I was working on a Keynote presentation on Creativity for the first 3 weeks of July which ate up all my mental energy, and I ended up being late on a number of assignments for 642. Thankfully, Corinne, my instructor to 642, has been very laxed with deadlines and has been ok with late work. I'm currently in my last week of summer holiday (I start teaching Aug.2 at my new school) so I'm actually trying to wrap up all assignments for the course this week, instead of waiting until the last minute to hand everything in. So this week will be a busy week for me!
Overall still feeling good about the MALDT program, however, I have some questions about how everything lines up with ISTE as there have been numerous occasions where instructors have said something to the effect of "if you want to use this assignment for your ISTE cert, you have to do _____ but I don't require it for this course." So I'm worried that I've done well in most of my assignments but possibly not done all that I've needed to do to prepare myself for submitting my portfolio to ISTE. I guess I don't want to finish the MADLT program and have to go back and revamp a ton of work to make it ISTE-ready, when I thought it already was.
Well, if you read my last post, you may see that I had no clue I had all of August off from my MALDT. It was definitely a welcome break from the program because I recently started working at a new school, and started there August 2nd. Actually, having that month off of my course work probably saved me because I've been super busy this last little while, and occasionally felt like I've been drowning a bit in my new school.
I've recently begun EDU 643, "Instructional Design", and have just completed week two of this course. So far it seems ok, however, I'm not loving the structure, nor am I enjoying the "office hours" only thus far, since it's not the easiest for me to attend scheduled times for these. In past classes, I have found it very helpful to have videos to watch on my own time of recorded online classes, where the instructor goes into detail about their expectations, how the course is laid out, and some basic instructions for the assignments. I especially appreciate these videos because I don't do well with walls of text when looking for information, and I emailed the instructor and, unfortunately, received another wall of text as a response in my email to assist with my concerns. I find it interesting that with a program that teaches so much about differentiation and UDL the instructors aren't following this more in how they deliver content to their own students.
Another concern that I mentioned in my last blog post is whether or not I'm creating content that is acceptable for ISTE certification in each of the classes. I've emailed the director of the MALDT program and he said that this would be addressed in one of the final classes, but combing through two years of classwork, long after they've been completed, for some reason doesn't sound that appealing to me. Why not make them ISTE-Proof while doing them?
There has actually been very little talk of how the program connects to ISTE certification so far, and little reassurance that what we are doing will connect with certifications, which is worrying. I'm not necessarily doubting it will, I just wish the school could do better in creating these connections for students, as that's big reason why I chose this program.
Anyways, that's all for now.