Week 5: PSA Reflection

Our PSA is complete other than a few minor tweaks.  We seemed to be a team in crisis with one member about to give birth, the death of my grandmother, and another team member with a critically ill family member.  But that is life and especially life as adults.  Even with the emergencies and full time careers, we were able to work together to create a video that gets it's message across.  We began collaborating on a Google doc and kept that document going throughout the three weeks.  The chat feature was extremely nice as we used it to discuss decisions as we met through the Google document.  The downside of using the chat is that there is no record of what we discussed in those sessions.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wTv2Zq-8UIDAMyLp_oZ5Q2RLFSY1jVc60gIPK_OXjhc/edit

We quickly narrowed down to what topic we wanted to cover and began throwing ideas around on how to present it.  We decided upon a series of scenes that could be divided up among the group and then turned in using dropbox.   We gave ourselves all of week 4 to get the filming done.  The last week has been spent editing and making adjustments as various members of the group gave suggestions.

Working with a team was daunting at first.  My partner and I from the first 2 weeks wanted to stay together so we threw a call out on the discussion board to find other members to join us.  We found several willing people in a matter of a hour and were in business.  The group worked well together and I was reminded about the process of give and take when producing a group product.  We also all live in different parts of the state and so relying on web 2.0 tools to get the project done was an interesting experience.  I've used those tools before but not to work with people from different areas.  Overall this was a good experience and I liked building relationships with folks in the program that until now had only been know through postings on discussion boards.

I will use the skills, tools and resources I have learned in this class as I continue to work with teachers on campus to create their own digital stories.   I will remind them about the process of having clearly defined tasks, assigning roles so all students are accountable, and the importance of having a good story or message to tell.  All things this course has taught me.

 

Think Before You Link by Pam Mahalec, Robin Young, Casey Smith, Ana McKinney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Web Conference - Week 4

I attended the web conference on Sunday, December 11th. The conference began early in the chat section, which was helpful to read through. The technical issues were the most frustrating with audio and video cutting out consistently. I found myself distracted by the technical issues and the lag in the chat section from when someone would type in a comment about the lack of audio and the time the professor would read that comment. It is hard to troubleshoot issues in this situation when you are 5-10 minuted behind in the chat conversation. I was glad to hear live about the changes in the assignment. With EPIC losing documents it is very confusing to know what to turn in. I am actually still a little unclear, but am using the email sent out by my IA. I do find the conferences helpful as members of the class help each other work through different questions and concerns. I wish there was a way to keep the conversation more focused and ensure everyone got the main information at the beginning with time at the end for personal questions. Overall I find about 5 minutes of information helpful to me from each web conference. I will attempt to watch at least one more of the conferences to make sure I have everything completed for this course by Friday.

Action Research: BYOT Presentation

I was finally able to present BYOT ideas to teachers on campus as a session during their off periods. I had about 20 teachers attend and all were excited about some of the options available through texting, emailing, and apps. I am including a copy of the presentation i use to explore some of the options with the teachers.

 

I am looking forward to implementing these ideas in the Spring Semester.

Web Conference Reflection - Week 3

I watched the November 29th web conference.  It was a small group that attended the live session.  Dr. Abernathy clarified the discussion board requirements, which I wished were included in writing.  This has been the most frustrating thing about this course is that the information given in writing conflicts with the information given in the web conferences.  As a student you almost have to watch or attend all of the conferences in order to be on top of what needs to happen.   The flip side is that most of the conference is not needed information as it is answering individual questions.  

A third of the way through the conference Dr. Abernathy had to take a phone call which lasted for the middle part of the section.  This made the rest of the web conference limited to what happened in the chat between the few live attendees. I am not sure what happened that the web conference did not resume, but I do know that the professor has had several personal tragedies occur lately to close friends.  Once again this is a great example of how life happens and that we all need to be flexible to get the job done.  I have appreciated the multiple opportunities to attend conferences which makes it easier when things like this happen, you have another opportunity to get the answers.