Cover Letter

Throughout this semester I enjoyed all of the readings and writings that were required for the class. The two books we read were What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee and Nonfiction Matters by Stephanie Harvey. The book I enjoyed most was by Harvey because I felt it had real strategies that could be implemented in the classroom. I didn’t sell back either book and hope to refer back to these when I am an actual teacher. In Harvey’s book, I especially liked the way she lays out what reading items you need in your classroom and how you might organize your reading section. I think these suggestions will help during my first years. Aside from the book readings we also read 16 articles which I found really helpful. I mostly found the four articles that I read helpful and basically just referenced the others. I enjoyed reading about how to teach writing and I learned techniques that I had not previously considered. I like the concept about having students write about what is meaningful to them. It makes sense!

We also had several writing assignments. The digital document was my favorite although I probably put my most time into that assignment. It was hard to do because I had never made a movie before but I really liked the challenge. I was proud of my work when I was done. I think I felt proud because it was all about something I have learned and a challenge I have overcome. It’s fun to put that together! The blogs and the wiki’s were not as much fun although I didn’t mind writing. I thought the annotated bibliographies were hard as it was something I had never done before. It helped me to have done those in order to finish my memorandum. I enjoyed writing that memo because it made me feel like I was actually teaching and had something important to tell. I think the memo will be useful to me as a teacher because it forced me to look at the important aspects of teaching writing in the classroom. Finally, the last piece of writing we did was our writing sequence assignment. That was great! Although I was a little burned out by the end from the whole semester but it was fun working on something that you might actually use in your classroom. It was nice you allowed us to work in groups because I think my quality of work was much better. Also, being tired and burned out by the end it made it fun to work with friends.

In conclusion, I thought this class was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the environment that was created by our class. We all had fun together and by the end I felt I knew everyone, perhaps because of the digital docs. I will definitely take the things I have learned with me into the classroom. Thanks!