Process of creating the TIE 542 final project

I have come to the conclusion that this class was hands-down the hardest class that I have ever taken. I am not usually one to shirk a lot of work. I am generally the student who goes above and beyond what the requirements are, for an assignment. This class however, I really felt as though I was barely keeping up with the assignments let alone going above and beyond. I have to admit that I learned an immense amount because of the assignments but since the course was only six weeks long I really felt as though I was rushing through, just to complete the assignments rather then making them applicable to my classroom.
I have to honestly say that when I read the course description for this class, I thought it would be an absolute breeze. I consider myself to be fairly tech savvy, but I found out that what some of the staff at my school consider to be tech savvy is a whole different ballgame from what we were dabbling in, during this class. Creating a website didn’t seem to hard, but the challenging part was trying to figure out how to complete some of the 15 requirements and not having a clue as to how to do any of them. After hours of research, and talking to classmates, I finished the website and absolutely love it. The next task to conquer was the webquest. I have seen webquests before and didn’t think it would be too difficult to create but once I started to deal with the whole concept of Inquiry and realized that most webquests out there have nothing to do with inquiry, I realized that I had a long road ahead of me. I think the toughest part of the whole process was creating the teaching guide. I needed to make sure that I was truly making an inquiry based project and making sure that my wording was correct to bring about an inquiry based project was harder then it looked. I am really looking forward to using this webquest with my kids this year to see if it is appropriately written. I am hoping that the kids will get a lot out of it so that I will be motivated to create some more inquiry based webquests. If there was one thing that I would change about this course, it would be to either cut down the requirements for a six week class or don’t allow it to be a six week class. I spent enough hours on this class for it to be considered a 6 credit hour course, not a six-week course. I truly learned a lot during this course but never want to go through this kind of stress again.