All members were present at our Thursday, February 10, seven o’clock meeting. I was able to attend the first fifteen minutes and Wheatley was able to join just before I had to leave. Allie, Amanda and Leslie were present the entire time. I believe that everyone did their best to participate and contribute.
We chose to teach Wordle and the technology to facilitate learning using Google Docs- Spreadsheets. Our project will include the following elements: 1) Instructions on how to create a Wordle with screen shots. 2) Features of Wordle also with screen shots. 3) Explain and show 3 examples of how to use it in classroom for different content areas. From my understanding, the examples we will use are two of my classes, Family Life (8th grade) and Computers (6th grade).
Our time-line has everyone busy this week.
By Friday Feb 18, each member will create the following:
* Amanda - Instructions of use
* Leslie - Features of Wordle
* Allie - Deaf example
* Abbie - Examples (Life Skills, potentially have a student modeled example?)
* Wheatley - Example (Spanish)/research?
Storyboard Due Sunday Feb 20th
Next Meeting Time: Google Doc chat?
Thursday March 3: Final project done
We used Adobe Connect to brainstorm as a group. Obvious perks are that it is free and familiar to all of us in Team4Tech due to previous use. Other advantages include that the meeting could occur anywhere there is Internet access. I appreciated and the record-ablity feature for voice, action and chat. I am especially thankful for the recording as I had a prior educational commitment at 7:30 and could not stay for the time agreed upon by all other group members. Now that I’ve had time to review the recorded session, I was able to see some downfalls of the meeting. I suspect, however, that similar issues would arise when using any technology. At any rate, disadvantages of our session included individual technology issues, humming, buzzing, echoes, and unfortunately a poor Internet connection for Wheatley. I think the feedback issue was resolved by ensuring that all participants had their headphones plugged in so that sound from speakers were not re-entering microphones to be heard again. Another disadvantage that I noticed, as I had to watch/listen to much of the meeting later, is that because I don’t personally know anyone, I really could not discern between people’s voices when speaking. I did not know who was saying what or when and two girls had very similar voices; I think Amanda and Allie, but I’m still not completely sure. We had visual abilities at the start of our meeting but they disappeared very soon into it. The visual capabilities would have helped clear that up to see who was speaking when. In addition, I think that I had another course where we had meetings using Adobe Connect and it was helpful to use the hand raise feature before speaking so that no one accidentally interrupts another. With visual cues in a face-to-face conversation it is easy to predict when some is speaking or about to begin. Unfortunately, without visual cues and delay of someone speaking, I think we overlapped each other a few times. Wheatley had technical difficulties. She and I later discussed how frustrating that is when you have more to contribute and cannot. I understood completely because as I watched what I missed, I wished I had been able to participate the whole time to provide input to clarify my own understandings or more quickly resolve an issue that I had past experience with and our meeting could have been less time consuming.
Overall, I think that the meeting went well and was effective use of technology to help us plan our group project.
Link to our meeting.
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