It’s hard to think of just one thing that was most valuable to me in this class. We were introduced to many new technologies that I had not used before. These will definitely be useful when trying to incorporate different learning activities into a course. We learned tips on how to give more effective lectures and even hosted an online lecture for a class of dental hygiene students. The variety of assessments were helpful in deciding how we will assess our students and still address course outcomes and objectives. There are so many things we learned that I had not thought about being part of my course. Writing a syllabus and and using the peer review process have been very helpful in finding ways to set up a course. So many of these assignments and activities were beneficial in learning how to teach a dental hygiene course and how to set up goals and objectives that will align with accreditation standards and program goals and objectives. I feel this course has really prepared me to be an instructor and provided a comfort level with adding new technology into my courses.
Overall if I had to pick one assignment that we did this semester, I would chose the online teaching assignment. This gave us a chance to host an online web meeting with students and teach a specific topic to them. We had to prepare for the lecture and come up with learning activities for the students during the lecture. Even though I thought I had prepared a good lecture, Rachel offered great collaboration and advice to make the teaching experience better. I felt this experience really tied in a lot of what we have learned the past few semesters and finally gave us a chance to interact with students and see how we faired in online teaching. The experience alone was very beneficial because so many schools are looking for instructors with online teaching experience and capable of providing an online course. Although this was only a brief hour and a half online teaching experience, it gave a feel of what online teaching was like and even presented some technical difficulties that often arise. This assignment really helped build a bit more confidence in my teaching ability and makes me feel more comfortable with the idea of teaching a course online in the future.