I most certainly learned a lot throughout this course. There was many great resources and tips to help me be more successful in online classes. It was really hard to choose which topics to discuss here because there was a long list of takeaways from this class. But below is a list of the three most important takeaways.

1. Time, Task, & Environment Management was the most important section for me. I have always struggled with time and task management when it comes to online classes. The best tool that I learned about in this class for bettering my time and task management skills is Trello
   
2. The next takeaway that I got out of this class were the SMART goals. When following these specific goals you will be able to accomplish your task on time and help you stayed focus so you can get a good grade or be successful at any task you tackle. The Smart goals are:
   • Specific
   • Measurable
   • Achievable
   • Relevant
   • Time-bound
   • To learn more about SMART goals and the definition of each characteristic go to the following website: SMART Goals
3. The third takeaway from this class was the resources on Web Searches. Before this class, I was always struggling when it came to searching online for desired information. The information provided  helps me be more proficient with online search tools like Google and it has helped me tremendously. Below are a few of the tips that I found most useful from the following website www.techrepublic.com:
   • Use the minus operator (-) to narrow the search
   • Use quotation marks for exact phrases
   • USe the plus operator (+) to tell search to include certain words
   • The wildcard operator (*) to fill in the blank
   • USe the OR operator to return the results with either two term

There was many great technology tools that I learned about for online classes. Below is a list of the online tools and links to those tools that I found most useful during this course.

• Trello (https://trello.com/home)
  • Trello is a great tool for organizing your weekly tasks. This allows you to create weekly to do list that you can keep track of throughout the whole process of the task. You can move items from the to do list, to in-progress, to completed. It also allows you to color code groups of related tasks to make them easier to find.
• GroupMe (https://groupme.com/en-US/)
  • GroupMe is a really great tool for online collaboration. When working in group projects GroupMe offers an online meeting place for you to meet and collaborate with your peers. You can do video sessions, share documents, and get notifications on your cellphone when someone sends a message in the group chat room.
• MindMup (https://www.mindmup.com/)
  • MindMup is a great brainstorming tool for personal use and for online collaboration. It allows you to quickly capturing ideas, using a mind map maker designed to help you focus on your ideas. With MindMup you can brainstorm, create presentations and document outlines, and publish your ideas online and to social networks. MindMup allows you to create unlimited mind maps for free, and store them in the cloud. Your can access your mind maps everywhere, instantly, from any device.

     

Below are the 3 most useful reflection papers from this course that I see myself going back to in the

1. Week 2 Reflection Paper: Goal Setting & Motivation Regulation
   I see my professional self as a business owner of a ticketing software company. I can break down my professional self into the following categories: honest, self-motivated, team oriented, time punctual, goal setting, and successful. Maintaining a good positive work ethic and being an honorable boss with morals is what motivates me to excel in these areas. I want to be trusted as an employer and as a sales agent. Owning my own business would call for me to be self-motivated, time punctual, and good at setting goals. Being my own boss means that my business will only be as successful as I allow it to be, mainly by following these attributes.  The challenges I see myself facing are with being self-motivated, time punctual, and setting goals.I plan to overcome these challenges by focusing on breaking bigger goals into smaller goals and working on them piece by piece. This will allow me to work on being time punctual and setting realistic goals that will stretch my abilities. Learning goals that I would set myself would be to learn how to manage time better and techniques to keeping myself self-motivated. Using SMART techniques, I would break my goals down into smaller specific goals. This way makes it easier to record progress of my goals and to create a timeline. I would set time goals that are achievable but still require us to push our expectations.Before the start of this class I felt that I was a self-motivated learner. I thought that after 2 years of online learning that I had it all figured out. But based on my responses my perception of myself as a learner was close to accurate. There are a few areas that I can use some adjustments to. I need to practice on my time management skills and goal planning. I will most certainly make changes to my learning practices based on my responses to what I have learned this week. I want to change the way I manage my time and get better at setting realistic goals. For starters I am going to start practicing at breaking down my goals into daily tasks and writing them out on a calendar.
2. Week 3 Reflection Paper – Online Collaboration
   So far, my group and myself have not ran into any major collaboration problems. My group is surprisingly working very well together. The only issue we had as far as collaboration goes is at the beginning of the project we had a small problem getting in touch with one of our group members. But we emailed that group member and the instructor and successfully got in touch with the member during the first day of the week. In the past, one of the biggest and most commonly seen collaboration issue I have faced is Resource conflicts.More than once I have been in groups where one or more of our group members would not put their fair share of work into the group assignment, if any work at all. Most of the time, these group members were just lazy and were not as dedicated to the assignments and their grades as the rest of the group. The group members and myself would first reach out to that group member to see what was causing them to not help us complete the project. We would try to motivate the member to do better and give them a smaller work load. If this was unsuccessful we would then contact the instructor to see if they could motivate the lazy member. When all else failed, the rest of the group and myself would divide up the work and continue without the help of that group member so we would not fall behind on the assignment.In the future, I think it would be best to start the collaboration off by meeting in an online meeting place such as Adobe Connect or Skype to discuss the strong points and weaknesses of each member. This will allow us to assign roles to each member that will suit them best as far as their available time schedule and ability to complete the assignment. This will prevent the group from relying on an individual to complete tasks that they will not do and overwhelming any members with too much work. Another technology I will use in the future is GroupMe. This is a great collaboration tool because it allows each member to communicate as a group through their cellphones instantly. This tool will send push-notifications to your cellphone instantly just like a text message would, preventing missed communications between group members.
3. Week 4 Reflection Paper: Time, Task, & Environment ManagementI have run into many problems with online classes and time, task, and environment management problems. One of my biggest problems I have ran into with online classes is procrastinating and environment control. With online classes in the past I found myself waiting to the last minute to do my assignments. Sometimes I would have weeks to complete an assignment but would still find myself rushing to complete it just hours before it was due. I found it much harder to juggle my daily life tasks and school tasks when I switched to online courses.Taking online courses has proven to be very beneficial with my busy schedule. If it wasn’t for the ability to take online courses I would not have been able to finish school. But not being in a natural calm and relaxed school environment I constantly struggle to find places to study and work on assignments that are free from distractions and noise. Seems as if every time I study I am either interrupted by someone talking, someone being loud, or by my phone going off constantly. I never got the peace and quiet like I did when studying in the library in between classes.I have learned and I am still learning good techniques and solutions to my time, task, and environment management problems. The Center for Student Learning offers downloadable monthly and weekly calendars, along with a time worksheet that I believe is a great tool for time and task management (A. Leach, 2016). I have already printed these calendars because they will be very helpful with scheduling my weekly tasks into daily tasks. I also found it very useful to set daily and weekly reminders on google calendars that way I would get notifications on my phone. To solve my environment problem, I have found it useful to go to the school library twice a week for 4 hours. This gives me a quiet space where I can work without any interruptions. It also gives me the feeling of being in a school environment.
   

   References

   Leach, A. (2016, August 23). SPS Blog: Time Management Tips for Non-Traditional Students. Retrieved from College of Charleston: http://spsblog.cofc.edu/blog/6-time-management-tips-for-non-traditional-students