Reflect on your learning activities and experience.
This week felt like baptism by fire. Even though I got a 103% in CIT 160, it's been awhile since I took the class and I had forgotten a lot of JavaScript. While things are slowly coming back, studying on the basic subject of JavaScript was really good for me this week. I've been reading the beginner's JavaScript book again, doing lots of research, and trying code. At the moment, I am still feeling overwhelmed at having to learn everything we need for fluency evaluations. I just tell myself to keep studying and eventually it will all make sense again.
Teaching others what I was learning was a good teaching tool, too. It helped me realize what I still didn't remember that I thought I did, unfortunately. On the other hand, it reinforced those things I do remember.
Consider your openness to new ideas.
After studying up on basic this week, I decided to go searching for new functions I haven't used before. I have enjoyed looking for examples of how to style html pages without using CSS. The easiest way I have found so far is using for loops. While I did appending in some other classes, using a querySelector was new and pretty easy. While learning new ideas is fun, I can see why developers use CSS to do most of their styling. There was definitely more code involved for changing link colors using JavaScript than CSS. However, the more new examples I try, the more I learn.
Both the group meeting and the office hour were good examples of being open to new ideas. There are so many ways to accomplish the same task. I had been trying to use a <pre> tag to style my code examples. After searching online, I found the &lycode> tag. In the office hour we saw an example of how to do code styling using JavaScript. It's always good to keep looking for the best techniques. Attending office hours definitely brings new ideas to the table.
Consider your ability to rationally evaluate options and explain why options are selected.
I feel like I did well in this area for the week. Before our group meeting, I had my personal plan in place and based my proposed group plan off of it. It made sense to decide when I wanted to take fluency tests and base the group meetings off of that. I was prepared when it came time to present my plan for a group schedule. The other members liked it and proposed to accept it as is. My personal plan was a hit with at least one of them and he opted to use it for his as well.
After attending office hours, though, I discovered the plan had been done incorrectly! Initially we had each topic getting taught twice. During the call, we learned that all topics are to be covered by each person once throughout the semester. Instead of doing 26 teaching blocks, we need to do 39. Consequently, I spent Saturday morning going through and rewriting a proposed group plan. Now it is tricky enough that we each person will need to fill in what they want to teach when. I did get my part put together, but when the other members see the message about it, they will need to do their parts. We'll have to reevaluate at the next group meeting.
Reflect on teamwork.
The teamwork went okay. All the group members are responding to messages and joined the call. We had a good discussion on the schedule, albeit short.
What we didn't plan well, was I realized Thursday night we were supposed to be teaching code topics this week. This prompted a message to go out to members as we weren't planning on anyone teaching this week. The other members felt we didn't need to teach this week since it wasn't mentioned in the overview. This was a slight disorganization on our part, but also partly of the school site not listing it on week 2. I've discovered we are all very compartmentalized. When week 1 is done, it is out the window in our minds. Unfortunately, that is where it mentioned teaching in week 2! I am sure we'll be much more on top of it from here on out.
Reflect on your communication abilities. Document your growth as it relates to the course outcome.
I am going to guess that I am the obnoxious person in the group as I definitely post the most. I think we will end up using another platform for group messages as the school one seems more cumbersome than texting or a chat app we can use on our phones. There is also no way to know if a person has read a post from the discussion board. How we want to communicate will be a topic I'll be bringing up at our next group meeting. We did exchange phones numbers and email addresses so that avenue is open.