Week 12 Reflection and Review

Chapter 29 Reflection:
One of the key points that stood out to me from Chapter 29 was the comment that "e-learning environments are delightfully saturated with opportunities for informal or incidental learning outcomes."  Anytime I have ever taken an online course there have been learning outcomes that were never the goal of the course.  While I haven't taken many online courses, the few that I have taken have always led to further discoveries and discussion that was the original outlined plan for the course.  One of the best examples of this I can give is the course of 21 Things for The 21st Century Educator.  The course held specific learning objectives, however the knowledge and wealth of ideas we walked away with surpassed the course goals.

The second key point that stood out was "E-Learning can be synchronous or asynchronous."  I think one of the most beneficial components to online learning is the capability to work on your own time frame.  We are all graduate students, which means most of us work a full-time job, and have families at home to take care of too.  Setting up a class time to be at every night isn't always possible.  The flexibility to "attend class" when you have time is fantastic!  During the 21 for Things course, the instruction was webcast, which allowed us to not only access it whenever you were able to, but always enabled us to access it when we needed to review materials. Items still had a due date, which enforces responsibility, but their was flexibility in when you completed the tasks.  I think in today's society, this is a key component to education.

Online Application Reviews:
I cannot get enough of Google documents!  I use it not only for my storage, but my students use it constantly!  We have even dove headfirst into Google Classroom which is tied directly into the students Google Documents drive.  Google makes a great storage place for everything!  The suite hosts its own version of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.  So while it might seem pointless to use such a suite when you have Microsoft on your computer, Google documents have amazing features that out-reach Microsoft.  From the capability of automatically saving, to  eliminating the need for a flash-drive to transport files to work, my Google drive is my lifeline!

Sumo Paint is a image editing software program that I explored in the past, and again for this reflection.  The program has some great features, however it can be a pain in the butt too!  I have used it in the past when editing images in combination with Wordle.  It seems rather misleading, in that it tells you its completely online but the wants you to download their program. Plus, inorder to get their key features, you have to pay a monthly fee.  And if there is anything educators look for, it's free resources!  Once I got past the complexity of getting started (and whether or not I would need to download the program or not), the rest was decently easy to use.  The best advice I can give is if you understand other photo editing software, you should be fine to use Sumo Paint.  However I do wish it was slightly less complicated to figure out.