An ePortfolio Called ELLIPTICAL GO

Welcome to everyone who is taking the time to read a little bit about my learning journey in the MET program at UBC.

Purpose

My ePortfolio is a reflection on my learning journey and my transformation as a student in the Master of Educational Technology (MET) program at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and how I envision my work as an online educator.  Because I want to respect my teaching style but also move to congruence (Heimlich, 2002), I reflect on the reasons why I chose this program, how it has challenged my values and beliefs (Heimlich & Norland, 2002), how it has fulfilled my professional expectations, sometimes unexpectedly, and what the next steps are.  I also reflect on and make connections between theory/research and their applications in the classroom using technological tools.  The development of my ePortfolio has helped me define my goals as a professional in education.

Audience

My audience includes family members, friends and present and future MET students and MET educators. It also includes my teachers’ online colleagues.

Objectives and Questions

My main objective in developing my MET ePortfolio  was to demonstrate what I had learned: how I used a few eTools, shared knowledge and created ideas during the course of this program.  I also reflected on my learning and included ideas for further research.  I valued the social learning theory (Vygotsky) and I considered the collaboration among fellow students and with MET educators to have been an essential component of this learning journey.  It has definitely helped me reach my personal and professional goals.  In addition, I added my future goals to my ePortfolio in the GO section because I believe the success of new learning adventures depends on good planning.

In addition, here are some of the questions I have asked myself while developing my ePortfolio:

• Which artifact is better linked to my learning growth and how has it helped me in my practice?
• Are these artifacts connected to my teaching reality? How? What can I do to make it work in my reality?
• Why did I choose working on these artifacts instead of working on others? What were the pros and cons and can I make a good use of what I have learned?
• How important was collaboration in my online learning journey? How do I plan to transfer these new skills on a regular basis into my educational practice?
• Were there any challenges I encountered during MET and how did I face them? If I would have to do things differently during my journey what would I change?
• Am I stronger as an educator and what makes me say that? What do I consider being my best new strength and why?
• Are there any challenges I will now face as a graduate? How am I planning to work with them in the next months and years, now that I am alone without any more MET colleagues to consult with?

Further, in order to complete this ePortfolio according to what was expected in ETEC 590, I wrote a proposal called Elliptical GO that can be viewed here.

Finally, Elliptical GO, the title of this ePortfolio, corresponds to a metaphor explained in the section titled Metaphor and Guided Tour.

Your comments are most welcome! At the end of each pages, you will find an area to leave comments.

Reference

Heimlich, J. E., & Norland E. (2002). Teaching style: Where are we now? New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 93, 17-25.

Note:  I choose WordPress.com to build my website because I thought it would offer more features.  I realized later that it doesn’t allow embedding of anything other than pictures and videos from YouTube, which was disappointing.