As many people know, COVID-19 has ended many things including face to face school meetings. As a college student, this virus is confusing, stressful and inconvenient. How were classes going to be held? How would I get project assignments in? How would test be administered? How will I as an Art Education major make this switch from in class to online meetings? My first thought was how will I have the tools I will need in order to complete assignments from my 3D Design class or my Digital Technologies class? Well the answer is quite simple: I needed to change. I needed to change my Impossible project completely, and I needed to change from tools to household items for my 3D class. At first I was stressed and frustrated, then I realized this would be a great learning experience for me as a future educator. I've been studying how my professors have reacted and acted on the current global pandemic. I've learned the importance of checking in on the students during hard times whether that be through a pandemic or a child's personal problems. I myself have been going through tougher than normal times recently and it really helped to see my instructors checking in every once in awhile. I am a believer that these awful times will provide a better future in many different aspects. Now, I won't go in to detail of these aspects because that's not what this blog post is about. I want this post to be almost reflection of my shift to and change to completely online class meetings.
This year I'm enrolled in 4 classes and a lab, each taught by different professors, and taught very differently. I have 2 lecture based courses and 2 project based. My most stressful change has been in my Art History course. We have spent that entire course just taking notes on a lecture and being tested on those notes. Now, we have converted the course to long readings and discussion posts. This means that we are now to be tested on these readings. This is a huge change to me because I felt I got the most out of that class whenever I was sitting and participating in a live lecture, instead of reading a 30 page chapter and trying to retain information that way. I have learned that I have a much larger attention span in person, than I do online. My next lecture based class, Ecology, has decided to perform lectures as a pre-recorded video, instead of an online class meeting. This was smart to me because it allows us students to focus on the words of her lecture on our own time. Plus, she got out of the problem of online classroom management this way. My lab for this class fortunately gave us the option to settle for the grade we have earned in the class thus far. This was a huge blessing to me as I had already received an A in the course, so therefore I no longer have to worry about this class this semester. However, my biggest worries for this year regarded my 3D, and digital class. We had just finished a project where the wood shop was needed and crucial to the outcome of our project. I started wondering how would I be able to access some of these tools, and how would I know if I was using them correctly? Thankfully, my professor took out all projects that might have needed tools not accessible to everyone. This means we will be using supplies we already have and that can be found around the house. This allowed me to breathe a little knowing that that I wasn't expected to have all the needed supplies for this class.
Lastly, My ARTT 2372 course brought about some challenges concerning a project that was supposed to take over the rest of our semester. For my impossible project, I was super excited to figure out how a 3D digital printing worked, and I was excited to make something from one. Unfortunately, I have no access to one of these printers at home. So what needed to happen? Change. I needed to change my entire project. The good thing about this class is there are multiple different ways to incorporate computation into different things I could work on just online. I chose to use photoshop for my project. Im having my 5 roommates each give me a theme, then I am going to make digital collages for each theme and try to make them into a somewhat cohesive series. This will be challenging for me because I have slight knowledge of photoshop tools. Even though it wasn't what I thought I would be doing for my end projects im glad to explore photoshop tools more in depth. Another interesting aspect of this class is the Zoom meetings we have. This is my only class where everyone has their camera, and microphone on. I guess I never realized just how close everyone in this class has grown to be. One of the first thongs we did back together as a class is say how our experience so far has been with the transition into online learning. I took note of a few of my classmates responses and it is very interesting seeing how different people are reacting to this style of learning. Analissa believes zoom for many of her other classes is uncomfortable, as not all classes are as close as ours. Ismael was in all 3D classes and was confused on how he would participate in these courses. Chelsy was let down because she couldn't do print making at home. Claire was not a fan of zoom and was annoyed that she wouldn't have materials accessible to her like the wood shop on campus for her 3D class. Tyler has a difficult time taking zoom seriously since it is at home on his own time. The most interesting thing brought up was by Madison, she stated that one of the people in one of her classes is blind so zoom isn't very accessible to that one student. This was interesting because while I was thinking of my hardships with the switch I didn't even realize others might have more issues than me with online learning and connecting. Hearing this made me really think of the challenges of being a teacher and trying to adapt to everyones different learning styles and abilities.
Once again, this discussion showed me the importance of being a future educator during this time. I am able to gain knowledge on how my present educators are reacting to a problem that could happen in the future when I am an educator. I have learned that it is of the upmost importance to put the students first and before myself.