Sam Coulter

I'm always on the look out for ways to make my content and curriculum more accessible. It hadn't occured to me that semantic elements could be misinterpretted, and it's important to make sure your audience understands your message in graphic communications! I'll definitely be incorporating multiple prentation modalities in the future for my students, who I know have vastly different learning styles and backgrounds.

I try to make my curriculum as inclusive as possible, but I know there's always room for improvement. I really like the UDL framework concept and how it proposes to meet the needs of diverse learners. I'd like to incorporate the flexible, accessible, and engaging instructional materials to my courses, and offer students more variety in how they can express their ability and problem solving.

The lesson I took away from this module was utilizing lecture notes more effectively and varying assesment methods. I want to create a variety of assessments for a diverse group of learning styels, and I also want to lecture more from my notes than from a slide. It'll make my courses more engaging for my students, and hopefully they'll understand the concepts better!

I found the standards and objectives section paricularly useful. I think including those for my students will clarify the information and skills students will need to take away from lessons and labs, eliminating and question or vagueness involved.

I learned quite a bit about lesson plans, and I think the formatting aspect will be particularly useful for my future classes. More organization never hurt!

Oof! I wished I had know about time compression early on! I'm much better with it now, but my first semester was a real struggle to keep my class from running short. I found the overarching concept of "knowing your audience" very helpful. I'll be using pretests for my more introductory courses this fall, and hopefully be able to adjust my lesson plan as we go.

Devloping a grading system was my steepest learning curve my first year of teaching. I always wanted to offer extra credit opportunities, but I always found it difficult to apply them fairly and consistently. Reading about the extra credit and missed assignment suggestions was very enlightning. I look forward to being able to address late assignments and extra-credit more confidently with this advice!

I gained the most from the section about handling restlessness or inadequate backgrounds in students. I see it quite a bit, and it pains me to watch students struggle through a course due to poor or lack of advising or thinking they were prepared to take my lab courses. I saw it right away, and have since taken the initiative to add prerequisites to my lab course that would solidify their skills before they reach my labs. I'll be using pretests this coming fall. I had always struggled with making lessons that fit everyone of a wide range of skill… >>>

I like the concept of incorporating more senses into courses. I'm constantly saving unique print samples for my production class so my students can see first hand how print can be stylized. I think the note about creating a storyboard for your presentations was very insightful. I'll absolutely utilize that the next time I need to create a new presentaion!

I learned quite a bit! The areas that interested me most that I feel would be most applicable would be the guest speaker and field trip suggestions. I love the idea of an observation sheet, and I think it'd be useful in both a field trip and guest speaker setting! That way students know what to look for both out in the industry as well as talking with industry professionals.