Journals+2009

===__Journals__ __Spring Semester 2009__ __Feb. 3/09 __ === ===I went to Heritage today for my first visit with Tara's Family Studies class and did some "show and tell" with Avery. The students were great; they asked a few questions about Avery, her schedule, how Cole adjusted/ is adjusting to having a new little sister, and what regrets I have or mistakes I have made along the way about raising children. It was an interesting discussion. I hope they learned something by having us there. Avery was great the entire time, which was very nice for me! I was hoping she would cooperate and she made mama proud! I carried her around for a bit explaining what it's been like for me as a mother and how Avery's been in terms of her colick. I think I must have scared them a bit about parenting and how tough a job it really is! Good birth control right there hopefully! :) === ===It was important for me to be as open with them as possible (it wasn't hard for me to be that way, as I am a very direct and honest person and some of these students were students of mine last year). I wanted to try and create an open learning environment where the students could start to feel comfortable with me and the ultimate goal was to create a good enough "real" environment for them to feel as though they could share their opinions on our Family Studies wiki in our "virtual" environment. I believe this first visit really helped to lay the groundwork down for this kind of atmosphere. But I do think that having Avery there with me; for them to be able to see her movements, listen to her "language" and ask me questions about her development and get direct answers back, (sometimes even with real examples through Avery as an answer to a particular question) was truly the primary reason this field study started off so well. ===

__Feb. 10/09__
===Today the Family Studies class met me in the computer lab where I introduced the "Family Studies Wiki" to them and discussed what a wiki was, as none of them had ever seen a wiki before, or knew what one was. I then navigated around the wiki and showed them how it worked while they watched on the big projection screen overhead. Avery was awesome again! Thank God! She amused them with her little babbles and constant drooling while I asked them to type in their emails so I could give them permission to become members of the wiki. That pretty much took up the whole class. By next week, I'd like to ask them to respond to the first post I have put up on the wiki and will have more of them to come in the weeks ahead. I think this will be such a great way to communicate without me having to come into the school and will allow me much greater flexibility, being as busy as I am. === ===Over the next few weeks, I created several posts on the wiki and the students responded to them as openly and honestly as possible. I uploaded articles from an online source, "Babycenter.com", for it's articles on infant developmental milestones, as a comparison for Avery's actual development at the time. I also "embeded widgets" or uploaded videos of Avery over the span of a couple of months, in order for the students to be able to view Avery's increasing motor skill development, as well as her developing feeding and communication skills.  ===


===I am back from my wonderful holiday (much needed sun and sand!!) and was able to check on my wiki and the replies posted by everyone while I was away. I posted a total of 4 discussion questions for the students to respond to and got a lot of posts, so I was extremely satisfied with a) the number of participants and b) the quality of their replies. They really had interesting things to say about Avery's progress and how she compared to the developmental "norm" for babies her age. Most students were able to take comparisons from the BabyCenter articles I have on the wiki and view the videos I uploaded and then discuss Avery's progress in a very concrete, succinct way. I was very proud of myself when I figured out how to embed/upload videos of Avery from my Google photos to the wiki as a "widget". Breakthrough moment!! === ===__March 31/09 - A Last Reflection of Progress Made__ I found most students to be very candid in their responses (I would argue a little more so than in a face-to-face discussion) and I do think they found it very interesting to be using a different form of technology, one that a lot of them had never used before this experience. It seems like the general consensus was that they enjoyed viewing the videos of Avery and liked being able to track her progress from afar. I think that after meeting Avery and then watching these videos on the wiki, students began to feel empathy towards her and were interested in her because she was a growing infant - a real life example of the content they were learning in their Family Studies class with Infant Development and being assigned the task of taking care of the "RealCare Babies". === ===I know I would be able to find a way to incorporate a wiki into the P.E. environment somehow. For example, maybe using it as a performance tracker where we could discuss fitness successes during the semester. Or another thought is using a wiki as my own sharepoint site instead of using the my43 site for posting homework assignments, upcoming events in the P.E. Dept. & Athletics Dept. and using it as a form of communication between students and myself. I look forward to using this form of technology in the future and I am very proud of myself with what I was able to accomplish in such a short amount of time during one of the busiest times of my life! Running around with two young children is never easy, but add on top of that a wiki, and you get -- voila -- a miracle  ===