Reflection #4

The question creating started out very slow and I found myself being indecisive with everything I did. I made sure to stay in close contact with my mentor when I was first starting out with the questions and I was asking her numerous questions about content and what did she want. We finally decided it would be best to just get together in person to go over specifics (who would have thunk it, right?!) and once we did that, I felt SO much more confident in what I was doing. I hadnt thought to ask about how many questions or how many points she wanted in each section and we covered that in our meeting which gave me a guide to go by when creating these questions. I had only been writing one or two questions per lesson and making them 1 or 2 points a piece and we decided that there should at least be 5 points per lesson and that should include an activity on the vocabulary words and definitions. At first, I thought it would be difficult to get to 5 points but as it turns out, not hard at all and I have actually been putting closer to 10 points in each activity. Once again, I ran into some sections of material that I was not so sure about and asked her about and we found that there was still some that didnt need to be included so we made changes as needed. I made the decision, after our in person meeting, that it would be best to go back to the beginning and not completely start over, but to go back over what I had already created and add more as I saw fit. I found that after our meeting, I was able to create questions quicker because I was confident and knew what was expected of me. I knew that this part of the internship would take the longest and it is, but that is to be expected. I am taking my time and reading the content and making sure that I include important questions and meaningful questions. I have enjoyed playing around with the different activities that Soft Chalk has available to use. I chose to try to use a crossword puzzle activity for the lessons with a good deal of vocabulary and this is an activity that my mentor had not attempted to use so we both learned how to use that activity when we were together. I really think that it is a great way to cover vocabulary instead of always using matching or multiple choice. Soft Chalk really allows you to differentiate the types of activities you include and I have found that to be a great asset of the program. For the next few weeks, I will still be working on these questions. I plan to, once I get to the end, go back through each lesson and review the questions and check for spelling and grammar issues as well as go back to a few lessons that I left un-done. I also plan to, while Im starting back at the beginning, doing some formatting changes that we decided on last week in terms of colors and size of titles and subtitles. I will also look at the placement of the questions within the lesson and make sure they are placed where they should be. I plan to let my mentor look over all of the lessons before I begin the next phase of the internship, which is creating the new flex book on the CK-12 site specifically for this course. Im still enjoying this internship and look forward to learning even more as it continues!