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.
  

Authenticity and Improvements

As the students finish up their tri-fold displays this week, the thing that I see missing from their presentations is some interactions with real people in real careers. All of the information they have gathered is from books and online resources. Earlier in the unit, each student did interview someone about their job but that was before we chose which personality career they were going to focus on. I did hear two groups talk about interviewing a few people and showing their video for their interactive presentation - but that never happened. I did show the Artistic group videos from Unitedstreaming.com but they ended up not using them either.

I ended up being gone when the students were working on the career resumes and did not get a chance to teach some of the Word skills that I wanted them to use: paragraph format, indents and styles. We ran out of time and I cut the portfolio activity from the assignment.

If I do this unit again next semester, here are some of the things that I would change:

1. Invite guest speakers to class
2. Wait and have the students conduct the interview with someone in their field after they have chosen their topic.
3. Show some of the unitedstreaming videos earlier in the unit.
4. Have them use the "Best Jobs of the 21st Century" book for data for Excel project because some of the research took too long.
5. Walk them through the first Excel assignment and check for understanding as we go along.
6. I would wait and do this unit at the end of the semester when the students have more technology skills available to them.