Weekly Report & Reflection Post #2

Hey everyone!

Welcome back to my blog! This week’s session focuses on making a PLE. Before I started this course I had no clue what a PLE was, but now I know it is a Personal Learning Environment that is a system that helps learners take control and manage their own learning.  I wish I had known about PLEs much earlier in my academic career because I believe this is a very valuable tool to improve oneself as a learner. Today’s blog will be reflecting on who I am right now, who I want to be, and how I need to altar my learning environment to get reach those goals.

My Future

In 5-10 years from now I hope to have graduated from Brock University with a Sport Management degree, and have stable employment in my line of work. My goal is to work in Toronto for Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment. Although this is quite a specific goal  I would be happy to work in the commercial sport sector hopefully in one of the four major professional sport organizations (NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB). I hope to work my way up from an entry-level position to a position with regular hours and seniority.

Where am I Now?

I am just beginning my second semester of my second year of my undergraduate of Sport Management at Brock University.  I am now beginning to be able to pick courses that will cater to my goals for the future. I am also beginning to decide if I want to take the LSATs and go to law school.  As my educational career may soon come to a close I have begun to look for summer jobs closer to my line of work rather than working a retail or fast food job, which is what I have done in the past. This is posing to be more of a challenge than I original thought it would be. Hopefully I will be able to secure a sport management position, or a position that will contribute skills to my future career.

Changes in the Environment

I have also been experimenting with different ways of learning throughout university. As of now I have set into a good learning routine. I believe that this study technique works best for classes that involve lots of lists and memorization, which is most of my courses, but if I encounter a class that has a different teaching style than I will have to alter my learning style.

After I created my PLE Concept Map I noticed that I use a lot of tools for social media and education, but barely any tools for my career. Although I am pleasantly happy with my use of educational tools, I hope to expand my use of career related tools. I used the program called Popplet to create my PLE and I found it was very easy to create a visual diagram of my digital tools used. I will continue to use this program in the future. Here is my PLE:

McCann, E. (CC) 2016.

Lastly, I used the tool called Wordle that creates word clouds. A word cloud is a visual representation of words used most in a body of work (bigger the word, the most used); in this case it is a visual representation of the words I used in my last Report and Reflection Post. I liked that I was able to customize the colours and shape of the words. I found it is a very easy tool to use and I believe it will ass a nice visual aspect to my blog to avoid walls of words.

McCann, E. (CC) 2016.

Talk to you later!

Emma