Resume

Learning Activity

In order to give a personal touch to the Career Unit, I had the students make resumes this week. Initially the students looked at resume samples on the Internet and in our textbook to determine their purpose. Student then designed their own resume for homework. We spent one class period editing the content in small groups. Each student looked over their classmate's resume and make suggestions about word choice, content clarification, etc.. The next day the students used the “track changes” in Word to make suggestions for each other and then at the end either accepted or rejected the changes. Learning how to use the track changes feature in Word was a new skill for ALL of the students. I plan on using it throughout the semester.

Some other Word formatting skills I taught the students to use on their resumes: Adding space before/after paragraph, customized borders around text and paragraphs, font effects such as shadow and small cap, paragraph shading and changing margins.

The final resumes were printed on parchment-type paper to take home. They looked great!

Data Collection
I had the students evaluate their first draft of their resume. The results were:

March 13th Pre-Assessment Question: What do you think of your resume at this point?
1. I didn't make a resume - 0 responses
2. It's OK - but still needs a lot of work - 4 responses
3. It's pretty good - maybe one or two adjustments - 11 responses
4. It's awesome - I don't need any revisions - 1 response
17 responses / one student absent

March 16th Post-Assessment Question: What do you think of your resume at this point?
1. I didn't make a resume - 0 responses
2. It's OK - but still needs a lot of work - 0 responses
3. It's pretty good - maybe one or two adjustments - 5 responses
4. It's awesome - I don't need any revisions - 5 response
10 responses /data will be updated on Monday when students return from school activity

Observation

• All of the students made adjustments to their original resume (even the student who thought his was awesome!). The changes were in content, word choice, and formatting.
• The students reaction when they saw the final resume printed on parchment-type paper was positive. One student remarked, "Wow, this looks professional" - and it did!!
• Every student assessed their resume higher after the revisions.
• All students used new formatting skills on their resumes.