Overall Reflection

My Overall Reflection of GLIP:

I enjoy taking time to reflect back on things that I have done, especially when it comes to my own learning, and my teaching.  I developed a habit to reflect on things while I was in the final year of my undergraduate.  I served me well then, and through the three years that I taught within a classroom.  With that said...

I am having a difficult time reflecting back on this GLIP project.  I feel that it was a great project idea, but that unfortunately it did not move much past that for me.  Throughout the course of the group, I was the main person trying to accomplish the tasks as they were assigned.  GLIP was created to bring a variety of students together, to get them to talk and discuss their possible similarities and differences in reference to specfic talking points.  Instead, the end result for myself was that I worked alone, and had to search through the group members individual pages to try to pull information for the assigned Phases. 

Through my own research I did find a new website www.empressr.com that I enjoyed using, and can see myself using the future.  This site was very easy to upload to, design, and edit.  Everything was kept online so I could access it and update it from anywhere that had internet connection.  I could definately see using this as a presentation creation software that students can use to demonstrate their final products, present poems, etc.  An example is that students could use it to demonstrate patterns that they find during a patterns unit.  However, I do not feel that GLIP helped me to learn about this or experience this website, it is something that I could have easily found and used for another class or while doing something for my own classroom in the future.

I believe that in order for something like this to actually work, it would need to make a few changes.  For 1 I believe that the schools/teachers/students who agree to participate there should be a clear understanding that they must be an active participant within the site.  2 the schools that agree to partake should guarantee that the students who are in the group are given adequate access to the internet so they can participate, if this means pulling them out of a class once a week or whatever to put them onto a computer with internet.  This also means that the schools should check and verify that their internet is working efficiently enough to allow participation.  3  It needs to be assured that there are no obvious language barriers.  If language may be a problem, then translators or translation websites should be provided for these students.  Something as simple as teaching them how to run a site through a translator or having a English-speaking teacher play as an intermediary could save time and trouble.  4  The schools should be required to test out their accessibility to the website before the first assignment is due, so if something is wrong there may be time to fix it or find another participating school.

Unfortunately, I walk away from GLIP feeling almost cheating and as though I did not learn or gain anything from the experience except for the chance to see new interesting pictures from around the world, and a lot of undue frustration.

No Phase III Yet

I have checked back to the GLIP group main page a few times since my last post.  Unfortunately, the group part of Phase III has not been completed.  9 of 16 students have completed the portion on their individual pages.  I make the assumption that the Phase III will not be complete for this GLIP group.

I will be checking back on it from time to time.

Phase III

During an online class meeting last night, we discussed the progress of GLIP and the problems that we have been experiencing such as the lack of participation from group members, including the other NCSU student from ECI 524.  We were instructed to email the professor with a blurp about it.

For Phase III, we were informed that the member from ECI 524 was incharge of it, and we were to be active participants.  Phase III requires everyone to answer questions on their individual pages, and then participate in an online bulletin board with our group.  As hard as it is going to be, I am going to sit back and let my co-leader take the full lead of this.  So far I have taken the lead since the beginning when it was not my assigned role, so I am going to step back out of his way.  I have not talked with him since that one email that we sent back and forth, and he has not participated in much of anything else.  I hope he is able to take the lead on this.

It is kind of a blessing that this Phase has been assigned to him.  I can feel myself loosing steam when it comes to GLIP.  I began very excited about the group, the activities and the potential.  However, through the last 2 months, I have been practically the only person doing anything outside of the individual pages and it has drained my excitement.  Maybe through this interactive bulletin board members will be able to post freely onto it and with me being an active participant I may be able to regain my excitement for the project as a whole.

Working URL

I was informed that the second link did work.  The correct URL for the presentation is:

http://www.empressr.com/View.aspx?token=mRVMJvVQ3pQ%3d

Posted Empressr

I went ahead and posted the link to the Empressr video into the Phase II forum, as well as at the top of the Group's main page.  I've asked for feedback on the video.  Hopefully I will get some response.



**Update:  I did receive feedback from 1 group member.  One of the students in Russia.  The link was messed up, so I reposted another link.   Hopefully this one will work, and I will recieve more feedback.

Another Russia Student participates

Yesterday I was able to update another GLIP group members' listing!  Another student from Russia completed their Phase I and II!  I updated their space on our table which brings our numbers up to Phase I = 11, Phase II = 12!  I am very excited about those numbers!  Now if we can only get them to respond to something other than just posting the answers to Phase I and II on their own sites. 

I completed the Empressr presentation... on my own.  I did go back and edit it so to add information and pictures from the newest participating member. 

The URL is: 

http://www.empressr.com/empressrflx/Empressr_Viewer.aspx?token=mRVMJvVQ3pQ=&popup=true
or
http://www.empressr.com/empressrflx/Empressr_Viewer.swf?token=mRVMJvVQ3pQ%3d&loc=http
or
http://www.empressr.com/View.aspx?token=mRVMJvVQ3pQ%3d

I'm not 100% sure which one will work.

The presentation begins with a picture of a traveling suitcase.  It then shows an map depicting the overall travel through all of the countries.  I then showed each country 1 at a time.  The USA had the most places, pictures, and information so I put it last on the trip.  I even broke it down by state and then by city so not to clutter the slides.  I ended the presentation with a walk through of the themes that were shown between all of the countries.  I think it turned out pretty decent as a whole.  Unfortunately with Empressr, when you set the slides to auto-progression, whatever time space you place between the transitions is applied to all slides.  So some slides seem to take too long before they change.  In the future I may not use this website for this type of presentation again because of this, but it was fun to use.  I did like the site, so I will most likely use it again, just when the time of the transitions is the same, or not auto advancing. 

Empressr

I have decided that I am going to use Empressr for our GLIP travel brochure.  I do not want to keep waiting too much longer, and I am not getting any additional feedback from members of my group.  On the empressr site, you are able to add pictures, music, and text to slides, just like you can on a powerpoint presentation.  I am going to go through and save a copy of every picture that everyone has submitted.  I am then going to see if I can narrow the pictures down to be only those related to the theme of Nature and History.  I know that a few students posted pictures related to sports, so I will most likely not be including those.  I am thinking about inserting a map as well with the different countries marked so a viewer can clearly see where around the world the pictures are coming from. 


I hope I do not end up completing this assignment completely on my own.  While I know that it will benefit me to work with a new website that I have not used before and to use pictures from around the world to create presentation, it does not benefit the other members of my group if I do it solely on my own.  I am going to begin it, and keep an eye on the GLIP site to see if any one else can help.