Session Five Blog

Here are some scattered thoughts related to the effort of the past two weeks.

Regarding research tools--thjis was a revealing assignment.  I had never realy looked at the resource portals our schools have already purchased;    These include Infotrac, and SIRS.  Just now, in looking at links page from Arcadia High School I see that we also purchase Biography in Context and have a link to Virginiga' Community of Learning.  I stated in my forum post that I'd recommend to the media specialist that she switch from Infotrac to the Gale in Context Portals.  Then Cengage Learning called me with the pricing information and while I still feel that the "in Context" option is far superior, I see why we only have one out of six portals (Biography)  The price for Infotrac comes out to about $0.15 per student for 100 journals--or $250 four our building.  The asking price (it seems to be somewhat like buying a car, you wheel and deal) for each of the six in Context portals would be $1050.  To get all six portals would cost 24 times what Infotrac cost.  It's a good thing I don't make purchasing decision, because I'd neve want to spend that kind of money.  If I were looking at all the sources of income and the rest of the budgeting decisions, perhaps I'd feel othyerwise.

Next reflective point---for Capstone Two I'm going to do things differently.  I have been guilty of one of faults I find in others.  That is, I've looked over instructions too quickly and failed to do things as thoroughly as I might.  For example, I thought I'd save ink (again, being cheap) by not printing out the assigment schedule.  After a session or two I at least made the link to the schedule a favorite so I couild refer to it quickly.  This session I finally printed it out--next time around I'll do that rigth off the bat.   Saturday night it also dawned on me that had I paid attention to WHERE I was when I clicked on "add a collection", I could have saved all that reordering time.

I did organize my work much better for this session, hoping to have a little time left on the weekends for play.  This worked pretty well except I did not fully consider the time it would take to write the reflective descriptions for 2A,B,C, and D.  Nor did I anticipate the hours I'd spend trying to cut down on the number of characters in the student learning description--with older versions of word, I could check on that as I worked, with this one, I had to wait until I pasted it in and tried to save before I knew how much over I was.  My first attempt was about 4,300 characters over the limit.  I was frustrated to find on some subsequent attempts that I'd eliminate wording, re-enter, and it would say that the number of characters had actually increased (I question this, but, what can you do.) 

I guess I can summarize this posting by stating that for us disorganized types, this course has required a huge amount of effort.  But, I'm getting more efficient and expect Capstone Two to be less of a burden than Capstone One.  I understand why so many people wash out of this process and I'm proud that I'm still hanging in there.