EXPLANATORY MEMO To: Professor Kevin Brooks

From: Kelly Hannah Subject: Explanation for selected choices regarding personal fact sheet. Date: December 7, 2011

This is an explanatory memo regarding the choices I made when creating my personal fact sheet for my online portfolio. The content I chose to include and chose to leave out are directly correlated to the most influential pieces of information I obtained during my learning experience in English 458. The way that I designed my personal fact sheet was also done so to best meet my personal learning style.

Why did you include specific content? The content that I chose to include in my personal fact sheet were some of the most beneficial and pivotal pieces of information I have learned throughout the duration in ENG 458. The topics of writing shitty first drafts, using different forms of media to build a mystery research project, literacy narratives, sponsors of literacy, and journaling all played a huge part in my learning experience this past semester. I chose to include these in my personal fact sheet to also serve as a future reference tool when I am teaching in a classroom. The items that I listed will be relevant to what I will be teaching and will also serve as a guide when I need some guidance or a refresher on building a mystery or teaching the concept of writing a literacy narrative. Why did you leave other possible content out? I chose to leave the other possible content out, because I felt that the items I did choose to list best showed what I wanted to take away from the coursenew skills and techniques to carry over into my future classroom. While the other readings and group presentations were great and informative, I feel that the content that I selected best represented a handout that I would like to keep on hand for future references. I would also want to share this type of handout with collegues, because I feel that the information that I provided would be useful to them as well.

Why did you make the specific design choices that you made? I chose to keep the overall layout and imagery very basic, because I learn best when I am presented with printed material that is simply laid out. I didnt want to create something that was centered on having multiple graphics and a complex lay out, because I cant focus on the content and information when there is too much going on visually. I chose a narrative format for the overall layout, because the fact sheet is something I plan on using in the future. I wanted the

hand out to best serve my needs by keeping it basic and simple so that I could easily refer back to it.