Thursday, May 3, 2007

Interview Task

I have to admit: I was pretty overwhelmed with the task at hand during class yesterday. I had a few ideas in mind, but I didn't know which task I could perform that would show the best of my abilities.

Thank god for the resources in this class, though; the first avenue I traveled down was my del.icio.us page, because I keep many educational youtube videos on it. I browsed what I had, and then I decided that I was going to do a PowerPoint.

Unfortunately, I do not think you can save PowerPoints to websites, so I do not have the PowerPoint that I made in class attached in my blog. I can do my best to replicate my idea, however.

The video that caught my eye was a slam poet talking about the power of poetry. So, I started to make a PowerPoint about different types of "poetry" that would appeal to adolescents. I opened up with "What is traditional poetry assumed to be?" And then I included a link to a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, "We Real Cool." I prompted questions about how this relates to them, and then followed that poem with a link to lyrics by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which deals with a similar theme of growing up as an adolescent. Then, my last example was my youtube video of the slam poet, in an attempt to show the varying ways of poetry, even if they don't appear to be poetry on the outside.

I was going to include an assessment piece, or some culminating activity for my slideshow, but I didn't have time to do so because, when I tried to insert a picture from clip art, PowerPoint shut down on its own and I had to restart. Ugh! But this is the kind of problem that could pop up during an interview. Dr. Stearns walked in right as I began to panic, but she leveled with me, telling me that this could happen during the interview process. She's right.

So, I tried to handle it as if I was in the interview situation, and I started over. It actually worked out in my favor: I developed a better presentation this time with a more specific focus. Something good came from something that was terrifying at first.

Overall, this was a great exercise to practice in case something like this does arise in the future. It also prompts thinking for what I could do in addition to the idea I created. We really have to market ourselves to the best of our abilities through what we've been learning here at SUNY Cortland, and technology is definitely something we want to include in that shape-shifting portfolio, because technology in schools is on the rise. We want to show that we can bring positive changes in the technology area to their school--and we can! We're prepared; we just need to be able to perform when crunch time comes.

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