I can confidently say these two courses are some of the most professionally fulfilling ones I have taken in my post-undergraduate studies. Graduate courses sometimes leave me feeling overwhelmed or that I’ve wasted my time learning about topics that are either outdated or not applicable to my job. However, being a public cyber teacher, I can practically use what I learned in these courses. Being able to apply universal design for learning principles to my online classroom benefits everyone. Understanding different accessibility features and different technological resources gives me options when designing future assignments. The opportunity to update my portfolio, especially with standards to use as guidelines, helped me grow in my confidence as a professional. When I first made this portfolio, I was a first-year teacher with one teaching license and a B.S. Now, I am a third-year teacher with four teaching licenses and an M.Ed. Seeing my growth has raised my confidence as a professional.

I have also been able to use my newfound knowledge of online accessibility to improve the accessibility of my portfolio. I changed the color of hyperlinks to contrast more starkly with the background color of my website. Additionally, I changed all text that says “click here” to just state exactly what the hyperlink is going to. I also used proper headings instead of bolded texts to indicate different sections of each page. Lastly, I included an accessibility note on my home page, welcoming comments concerning the accessibility of my website.

Another positive result of these two courses, although unintended, was that I registered with WCU’s Office of Services for Students with Disabilities. I have never registered with OSSD at any prior institution I attended because I always worried about not being “disabled enough,” but these courses have made me feel confident enough to seek the accommodations I need. I hope that someday, I can get to the point at which I am confident enough to share my disability with others.

My only constructive criticism about these two courses is that I cannot easily apply Apple applications we learned about. My seventh and eighth graders currently have district-assigned iPads, but those will be swapped for Chromebooks at the end of the school year. All other grades already have Chromebooks or Thinkpads, including the teachers (seriously, the laptop my district gave me is identical to what the high schoolers get, which they themselves find upsetting). It would have been more helpful to have the option to use non-Apple applications for certain assignments.

Thank you for a useful and engaging semester. I look forward to completing my WCU program in Spring 2023.