Flight path

Current coordinates

My background with personalized learning for myself has often been me trying to find any aspect (even if it is very small) of a subject or lesson that interests me. When I am successful in doing so, I find it substantially easier to stay engaged with the topic and remember the information I learned. In terms of using social media to learn, I often go to YouTube to find explanations if I don’t understand the ones given to me in class. I also feel more confident with submitting assignments when I have heard several different perspectives on the topic as it gives me a greater sense of an overview. I have taught violin lessons the past few years and I quickly realized that ‘copy-pasting’ the exact same lesson plan does not work. Even for students who learned in similar ways, every person is still so unique. Although it takes more time to figure out in the beginning how each student learns best, it ultimately saves a lot of time and frustration for both the student and teacher. I have also learned a lot about my own learning style through teaching my students and been exposed to a variety of strategies. I think it is important to try different ways of learning and teaching because it can be the unexpected ways that are the most effective.

Mapping the route

Through this course, I hope to have a better understanding of when social media is appropriate and most useful for learning. I want to be an elementary school teacher so I imagine I won’t be using a lot of it with the younger grades but I am interested how it can be incorporated thoughtfully. Especially because I hear a lot of the downsides of using technology with young students, which I am not denying at all, but I would be interested to learn the positives and how to do so without overdoing it. For my own sake, I look forward to learning about privacy issues because I have very little knowledge when it comes to that topic. Lastly, I am curious to learn about how to use AI as an appropriate tool. I don’t use it at all currently but many of my friends use it in different ways so I am curious to see what I will learn about it from this class as I have not really been told to use it in a class before. Overall, I am excited for this course and I think it will be interesting to learn from classmates too. 

Anticipating turbulence

For me I think personalized learning and its relation to learning theory looks the most daunting because it seems as though it is quite unique to each student. I tend to struggle with concepts like this as well as creative concepts when there is no clear right or wrong answer. I have never enjoyed math, but I have always appreciated that I either know I am solving problems correctly or incorrectly. I like that there is access to other students’ work in this course because I do learn a lot from other people’s examples. I think this will help give a bigger picture of assignments than just reading instructions. I also plan to reach out (to students or the professor) when I am unclear. I have hesitated to do so in the past and waiting has never worked in my favor. This being a fully online course I think will amplify that struggle if I wait to reach out for help. I hope these challenges become less daunting throughout the semester and I look forward to working through them.