For me this has been my most important creation. I know it could have served as my research project had I chosen that path. As you go through this digital portfolio you will see that my digital photography course comes up over and over. It is something very close to my heart. My training as an artist is defined by my photography and teaching a photography class was something I never thought would happen. That I got to propose, design, implement, teach and share this course has been one of my greatest sources of happiness. Even now I look forward most to going to my photography class and I constantly show off their work. It is the course where I see students really fall in love. I’ve had so many “non-artists” and “non-photographers” who started the course and left as artists. It makes me happy. To include this artifact which bridged my professional work with my studentship was never a question. This is the work I am most proud of. That being said, it is not “perfect”, nor is it finished. A lot of my reflections are embedded within both my blog and my presentation.

More than this portfolio as I whole, I believe that this artifact reflects the culmination of all my learning. Specifically, it demonstrates all three of my themes. I have included it under digital literacy because I think that is the primary theme. In this project I explored how Twitter has been used in educational settings. This tool I knew very little about and was resistant to. However, as evident from artifact 1, I have been looking for a mind tool that lets my students share electrically, give and receive feedback, and connect to a larger community. Twitter afforded me those things. I relied on my learning from Special Topics in Education 2012 (artifact 3), because I transferred my learning of critical media literacy (CML) over to this project. Doing course readings for this class I was prompted to review earlier learning and borrowed a framework for critically analysing Twitter as a tool. I was able to consider the role of multiliteracies and the affordances these skills will provide my students with. My method for developing the tool and implementing it in my classroom was part of the larger process of making my class more meaningful and relevant. I have come to learn that digital literacies do not sacrifice traditional literacy. Rather, they are intertwined. Teaching my students how to use Twitter and co-opting it for education gave them skills they can use beyond my classroom, let them build collective knowledge and integrated the learning in my classroom with their digital culture.

Social and cultural contexts was important because I had to understand how my students, our society and culture uses Twitter. We looked at the “grammar” of the site and co-created “netiquette”. We also looked at how traditional power structures were at play. This was directly connected to my learning on CML and social and cultural contexts. I knew that we could both buy in to the culture and push back, use our agency. I think that this project demonstrated leadership because it challenges traditional uses of technology, traditional spheres of learning and models for others teaching practices that are relevant in the 21st century. This project was not perfect. It needs work to be better integrated into my classroom. Between my learning, reflection and student feedback I know how to do that.