Week One Assignment, Part 1.3

Self–Assessment

During EDLD 5306, each student took several self assessments including the Kersey Temperament sorter, the Multiple Intelligence Inventory, a leadership skills assessment and a technology literacy self assessment. I found that my temperament is a guardian – someone who is service oriented and is characteristically loyal. In the book the Five Love Languages of Children, a guardian would be a person who showed love through “acts of service” (Chapman, 1997, p. 94)

Prior to taking this test, I would have thought my personality was more of a problem solver as in trying to repair items mechanically. I am inclined to do many of these tasks alone, but I am not strong willed in my desire to achieve. If I were, it would not have taken me twenty-four years to finish this degree.

I enjoyed the tests because I had not thought about my aptitudes or skills in many years. When I think of being a stay-at-home, I realize that I do naturally use my aptitudes in my day. I can recognize also when I am misunderstood and why.
EDLD 5306 also required that I look into the STaR chart for one of our schools and several data documents that are used for databased decisions in schools. I learned that schools data fills schools and the most important skill is figuring out what data is important. “As we become increasingly overwhelmed by information, we must work hard to decide which information we are going to ignore” (Warlick, 2007, p. 21).

Learn as a Learner

To complete the assignment, I answered all of the needed questions for the assessments. I then analyzed the results and compared them to the given results and measures. This course allowed me to critically analyze my current knowledge of the subject matter and identify areas of strength and target weaknesses. I have always been a visual learner. I remember where I see things and recall their placement later. These assessments helped me to reflect on how I learn and have learned over the years.

One thing that I have learned throughout the courseware is the valuable insight I can receive from my cohort friends. We communicate on Skype frequently and will meet at graduation. Creating an Animoto video in this course was a great way to introduce ourselves to our colleagues and it was fun too. I had never put pictures to video before.

Lifelong Learning Skills

During this course, the knowledge I received from reviewing the way that I learn helped me throughout the courseware. For example, my strength in visual learning reminded me that I would do better remember lecture material if I first printed off the lecture script and then read along with the speaker. Underlining important facts and marking on the script helped me find and remember when taking midterms and finals.

The cohort 13 Skype group was an essential part of my masters experience. Not only have they become my friends, they were greatly helpful in course content that I was not familiar. They quickly knew the website I needed to look at to find information and could tell me if I misunderstood the assignment, which saved me hundreds of hours. I also enjoyed the discussion board strategy on throwing ideas out there and seeing where they landed. Obviously, anyone working in education cares about students, but often our opinions of how education and technology go together is different. This educational activity was informative. The articles by Mark Prensky were thought provoking, not because I agreed with what he said, but because I often did not, and thus needed to effectively articulate my disagreement on the discussion board. But I did agree with this Prensky quote, “Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.” (Prensky, 2001, p. 2)

Works Cited

Chapman, G. & Campbell, R. (1997). The five love languages of children. Chicago: Moody.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1. On the Horizon , 2-6.

Warlick, D. (2007). Literacy in the new information landscape. Library Media Connection , pp. 20-21.