Throughout this course, I’ve had a ton of opportunities to interact with, talk to, and help out my fellow classmates. This year in particular has made it really hard to connect with the other people in education. This is my final semester of University so it was definitely disappointing to go into classes knowing that I wouldn’t be able to have conversations or discussions with other students one last time. This class really helped to change that though. I was able to create connections and interact with new people, and pass on things that I have learned in the last few semesters to new people despite the distance between everyone!
There were a few different places where these interactions happened: On my blog, through comments on other’s blogs, the course community on slack, and through twitter.
WordPress Interactions
Here are some of my most meaningful comments and interactions that occurred in blog comments and one my blog. I lost a few of my early comments, but I made an effort to comment on other peoples blogs fairly consistently throughout the course. I also tried my best to comment back to people who interacted with my blog posts.
As I said, I also made an effort to comment back to those who commented on my blog and I also referred to other’s blogs when I noticed something in their posts that I liked or agreed with.
Slack Interactions
I didn’t get as involved in the slack community. A lot of the questions were about technology oriented issues, and that’s not a topic I am super well-versed or comfortable in. That being said I did still try to get involved and interact with others on that platform as well. I focused mostly on trying to help troubleshoot other’s problems, and I was able to share some of the resources that I had used in the classroom in the past. Here are a few screenshots of some of the interactions I had.
I was more involved on twitter than I was on slack, but I wasn’t quite as active as I probably could have been. Social media has been a huge stressor for me for a long time, so even though I didn’t share as much as I could have, I’m pretty proud of the interactions that I did have. I went from not having ever posted a tweet to having posted dozens in a fairly short amount of time. Below I’ve embedded a few of my best tweets!
I very much enjoyed the saskedchat, even though I was unfortunately not able to join many of them just because of the timing. I also really liked how easy it made it to follow blogs and get short updates on learning projects. Even though this was probably the most stressful aspect of the class, it was still really valuable for me.
I also just want to shout out Jenny, who was a huge help and support behind the scenes! Whenever I had little questions or needed someone to bounce ideas off of she was very much willing to help. Even though this help largely occurred behind the scenes, she’s been a huge part of my learning community this semester.
Overall, this was a great experience and opportunity for me. This being my final year, I feel like I have a great community and a great system of people who I will be able to consult and learn from once I get into the classroom and that is really more valuable than I can express.