With this course coming to an end, it is easy to see how beneficial it has been to my professional development. I was not sure at the beginning what to expect but surprisingly a lot of the tools we have been introduced to or used in new ways have already been valuable to my existing professional career outside of my academic studies. For example, I never really used Twitter and just viewed it as another social media app, but I now find it to be a great tool for finding resources. I now use it for all of my classes and professional career almost daily.
At times this course was extra challenging because I am not a teacher nor do I have a teaching background. However, since I am planning on entering the instructional design job field I found the content of the course and discovering how to integrate social media into lesson plans to be exactly what I signed up for. It will make for great practice in my future endeavors.
If I had to give future students advice on taking this course, I would say to research lesson plans that incorporate social media elements. For those who are teachers I would say to not only focus on the subjects you teach because you may find great ideas that can be altered to meet your student’s needs. I found finding lesson plans to be rather difficult because the concept of using social media in education is still kind of new but it ended up giving me a whole new perspective on awesome ways to change the way you can teach and motivate your learners.
The biggest surprise of this semester was I went into this course thinking I would focus on learning new tech apps, but instead learned new ideas that ended up being more important to my future career plans. I did have some doubts at first, but they quickly went away when I realized the potential of the content material we were being taught. I found this course to be a “must take” especially if you plan on working with younger audiences.
Jake Dalton 