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.