I am choosing our 168 hour assignment as my reflection assignment. Notating everything down in a neat schedule seemed nice and manageable when I had the structured little 168 hour paper in front of me in our first week of classes. I even transfered the schedule to my daytime planner. Monday morning came along and I settled in for the reading of Brands chapter one, and was overwhelmed by how long it took me to comprehend the literature. In my home country of Denmark, we learn english as a second language starting in third grade, however I never used the language extensively until I came to America. I have always felt comfortable speaking english but the extensiveness of different words and terms had me spending way more time on the reading than I had first anticipated. Juggling school, my job, and personal life has proven to bit a bit harder than I first thought. Initially I wanted to isolate the 18 hours for school into two and a half solid days so that I could fully concentrate on one thing at the time, but i found that it was too many consecutive hours of reading and that there was just no way that I could keep sane with the reading load bundled together like that. I have now made a different study plan to break up the reading over a course of four days. I also found that I have to make time in my schedule on Sundays to respond back to posts from fellow students. Breaking up the reading has allowed me to improve and speed up my reading comprehension, which is something that I want to focus on throughout this course as well as my future classes. Writing down all the words that I have looked up also increased my understanding of english vocabulary. Even though I am not currently taking any additional classes, this assignment has helped me to not underestimate the language barrier, and that I will continue to have to keep it in mind when scheduling school work.
Choosing my ePportfolio tool
Self Reflections
This ePportefolio will be my first. To start off with I will not make is public but when I feel confident that the material can be useful to others I will make it available to the public. Comparing WIX and CANVAS I find WIX to be the better option for me. As mentioned by others the canvas platform does look a bit plane and for my own enjoyment, both when it comes to creating it and viewing the page, I would prefer something a bit more colorful and engaging. CANVAS does seem easy to navigate but WIX has great navigation tools as well. I plan to use WIX for my ePortfolio. I have created websites on WIX before(nothing professional) and very much enjoy the drag and drop option.
Reflection assignment
Final Reflection
History 7A was my first ever online college course and I have gained a huge amount of respect for the virtual classroom feel that was created. Before starting the course I had heard rumors ranging from “online classes are super easy” to “Everyone thinks online classes are easy but really they are harder than on campus classes”. Regardless of the rumors I found this class plenty challenging and will not sign on for another one without remembering the commitment of the coursework. With the workload of this class I will say that I definitely was able to reach my goal of improving my time management skills. I simply had to if I wanted to manage all my weekly tasks. My biggest win regarding this goal has been scaling down on the amount of times I check my work emails during the day, and though it was tough to leave my inbox alone in the beginning, it was actually quit the blessing in disguise. I am a private vocal instructor here in Pasadena, and with over 40 students a week the individual requests and questions tend to be waiting for me any hour of the day. Being forced to take a step away from the emails made me realize that it is not the end of the world should it be a day or two before I answer my students, and they have actually been very respectful towards my private life. It has given me great confidence that I am able to further my academic life as well as manage my job. My knowledge of American History has grown tremendously in the past two months. Taking my time to dive into the text worked out great in the beginning of the course, but I must admit that as the weeks went by I found it hard to manage relaxed reading with note taking for the quizzes. Another student suggested that I watch the John Green videos before starting the chapters to help find the general points, and it really helped me along with the power point presentations and the questions in the text book. Connecting past events with the present has been very interesting. I feel that my view of the American people have changed and as I am from Europe, and settling here in California myself, it made me sympathize with some of the feelings felt by the first settlers. The document interpretations have been my favorite part of the history course. Gaining an insight into peoples life at the time through letters, speeches, and other documents made at the time, made me view history in a whole new way. Be it my age or the textbook, I do not know, but I was able to connect with the subject differently than previously in my life. Funnily enough the document interpretations are also what helped me reach my last goal of improving my english writing skills. Not having english as my first language has never bothered me until I had to write and read the document interpretations. Having to do so many in such a short amount of time really gave me a crash course in writing. It made me feel like it was not a question of whether I could do it or not, but a matter of just getting it done. This pushed me to not doubt myself, and just do it instead of thinking about doing it. As I mentioned in the beginning of this reflection, this was my first ever online college course. I am surprised at how well the interactions with all my fellow students have been in the virtual setting, and how the different personalities have been able to shine between the lines of both document interpretations and ePortefolios. This will definitely not be my last online college course.