End of a Semester

Last week is suppose to be our last week of service. However, the middle schools had their Spring Break that week so we did not have the pleasure of working with them at that time.

Overall, I feel as though the program could be so much better. Admittedly, it is a new program and Cluster Challenge is in need of some experience as a service-learning program itself, considering it has only been a program since Fall 2009. It is also new to the middle schools as well, which makes it all the more disorganized.

Despite this, I believe that I did gain enough of an experience to consider this program adequate for connecting what I have done at the service site to the Bentley classroom.

There is the obvious connection that as a Bentley student, I was able to provide what I learned about layouts to middle school students who were looking into building simple websites for their school projects. However, I was not limited to website building: I have also dabbled teaching teachers and students Microsoft Office tools such as Power Point and Excel.

Thinking critically, communications with the teachers regarding web 2.0 tools can be correlated to creating code for a website. If the code is written incorrectly, the website cannot be implemented correctly as well. This can be applied to the relations with teachers: communicate with them insufficiently when teaching them web 2.0, then the teachers won't be able to implement the tools to their students.

Having done this program for both semesters, I have seen the dramatic changes between last semester and this semester. It has gotten more organized because we have accepted less 4th credits and gained more Project Managers. Before this semester, we have only worked with one school. Now we work with both middle schools in the city.

There continues to be many aspects of the program that needs to be improved upon, but Cluster Challenge maintains its purpose to spread technology to the middle schools.