Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Finished?

Today is the day of marking and I don't feel ready at all. I have decided to work as hard as I can until tonight in the hope that my website is marked later on in the night. I found the working in groups aspect of the course very difficult and will strive to get a good mark in the exams in order to pass this course. I feel a little disappointment that I did not start this project earlier and complete it by the due date as my previous marks have been moderately good and I feel like I could have done a lot better at this assignment. This course has taught me a lot about university life and I will certainly learn from my mistakes.

Lost

Help!

Ive contacted Guznal, the absent third member of our group and informed her about our task. She has been very helpful and found some useful sites and video to help with the project and I'm very grateful for her help. Im working hard at the project but got an unpleasant surprise when I realized that we need to reference the material we found using proper APA referencing format and using in text citations.

Group meetup

Recently,  I met my group members and we began to discuss what was going on. We eventually decided to do a puppet show as a project designed to spread the word about bullying. We decided to use Google Sites because it is a free and simple option to communicate and contribute to our group work. However, later my group member Michelle had a hard time gaining access as she couldn't make a Google email and sharing was difficult. I had a look at this video to help me understand the concept of a wiki and how sharing works on Google sites. I'm feeling very overwhelmed because we don't have much time to work together and on top of 15-21 hours of work over the weekends, the project will be very difficult to complete.

Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Groups

I was unfortunately away on the thursday we were assigned groups. I was a bit confused but after checking the LMS site I found a (google drive) document that told me the names and contact emails of my group members. After sending an email to each group member introducing myself, I began to feel worried when a week later there was no reply. One of my group members had been in my group for researcher so I just contacted her on facebook but I still had to find the others. After searching I eventually found another group member Michelle and we communicated via facebook. She seemed just as confused as I was and I felt quite relived. We arranged to create a facebook group and meet in class the week after.

Tuesday, 16 April 2013

Peer reviews

I have been putting some finishing touches on my website, writing a bit more information on my researcher page and adding a few more images to my blog. Last night I completed my peer reviews and received some feedback on my blog and website.
A screenshot of one of my review pages with feedback
 


 One person suggested that I break up my text with screenshots of the processes and programs used to create my screen-cast.  Another person gave me a number of useful suggestions, including making the font size on my word document bigger in my screen-cast so people could see my referencing more clearly. I have re-done my screen-cast to take this into account and will thoroughly spell check my blog because most reviewers noticed some spelling errors and lower case letters at the start of sentences.  As an internet communicator, I often use a lower case "i" when chatting online and should be careful not to make this a habit. I'm feeling quite good about my blog and screen cast and am reviewed to have completed it for review on time.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/gi/127555697/


Interractions over facebook

To keep contact with the other members in our group, we created a facebook group.  I found this very effective and was a good example of collaborative learning.  Megan was having trouble with her screen-cast and created a post in the group asking us what programs we used and how we uploaded the video to our website.  I experienced a sudden lack of confidence when I couldn't find a way of uploading my site onto the peer review system but when I realized that other people were having similar difficulties I felt a bit more confident.  Megan seemed to have the most trouble creating and uploading her screen-cast while Guzalnur had trouble adding enough information to her blog.  Overall I thought Ashima was quite a long way ahead of us and often helped us by answering questions.  Facebook now has a new feature that tells you who has seen your post.  This was useful because we could make sure that all people in our group knew what was going on.

Our Facebook group