Starting the journey
My first tentative steps into graduate school were taken as a non-degree student through an online course. My idea was to just dip my toe into graduate school to see if I felt like I would sink or swim. ECI 523: Teacher as Researcher turned out to be a fortuitous initial choice because it provided me with skills I could use right away in the classroom.
In the final research project for this class, I investigated how participating in Socratic seminars affected the thinking skills of students who were not identified as Academically Gifted. In pursuing this line of research I was touching on two of my interest areas, critical thinking skills and extending equitable access to educational opportunities to previously overlooked students. My second course was ECI 546: New Literacies and Media, also online, and it was a good thing I didn't take this course first. It was so full of technology that I had never used before that I may have been scared off from the whole endeavor. However, though Dr. Lisa Hervey challenged me to my limits, she never asked for more than I was able to give. The many new things I was learning kept my head spinning and connections sprouted between so many things that I kept creating non-assigned pieces in addition to the assigned work. I have linked a couple of them here. The capstone project was the project in which I was introduced to wikis, a Web application that I have used repeatedly since. |