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.

A wiki message from a group member!

I recieved a message from one of the GLIP group members in Russia today!!!  It was from a member who has not participated yet.  We exchanged messages a few times, with me clarifying the assignments for her.  She completed Phase I and Phase II.  She also commented back my post on the Forum.  It looks like we have a very active group member!!  I am very excited!  She is the first member to respond directly to anything that I have posted.  I assume that she was one of the students who had difficulty getting online, but maybe that problem has been fixed.  Atleast now, I may have someone to bounce ideas off of and another opinion to take into consideration.  I have already updated her boxes within the group table.  Slowly but surely our boxes are filling up. 

So far both students from NCSU have completed I and II.  3 of 4 students from Hawaii have completed I and II.  Both students from Ravenscroft (Raleigh) have completed I and II.  The one student from Dillard Drive completed I and II before he left the class.  1 of 3 from Russia has completed I and II.  The student from Bejing has completed Phase II.  The student from Turkey has completed Phase I and II.  Unfortunately, 0 of 3 students from Exploris have completed any of the assignments.

I am sure that each of these schools were made aware of the due dates and what not before the beginning of this GLIP assignment.  Other than technology problems, you would not expect there to be so many issues.  Hopefully they will get ironed out very soon.

Email from Co-Leader

I finally received an email from my co-leader.  In it he apologized for not contributing to the GLIP group but assures me that he is going to take a more active role.  Hopefully with 2 of us trying to solicit participation we will be able to get a lot accomplished!  My co-leader did go through and update our table to show the students who have participated.  We are now up to 9 of 16 have completed Phase I and 10 of 16 have completed Phase II!!!  I am very excited about this!!  That gives us a lot more information and pictures to work with!  The theme still seems to be the same with Nature and History, so I think I will pitch that to the group and see what they think.  Once we have found a theme, the next step will be selecting which pictures to use from each country.  Ideally, we will be able to get the people from each country to talk with each other and narrow their pictures down, then create a description of their countries as it is shown through their selected pictures.  If we can get different groups to do this, then it will simply be a matter of connecting everything together in the end for our travel brochure. 



Editted -> I posted to the Phase II forum asking for everyone's opinions on the Travel Brochure themes.  I also updated group member profiles while I was there.  I love reading about these new people from around the world!  I did put a comment on the top of main page asking for everyone to look at the forum.  This way no one who actually visits the site can say that they did not know to check the forum at the bottom. 

Wish I could email group members

I spent sometime today working on adding the links to students’ profiles.  It went easier than I originally thought it would.  By this point we are up to 7 of the 16 group members have completed their Phase I, but still only 4 have completed Phase II.  It is very disappointing.  In a way I wish that I had the emails for each of the group members.  I would create a gmail group for their emails, and could send out reminders.  I would email everyone in the group weekly with updates and encouragement to respond.  I do not know if it would improve the amount of participation, but it definitely could not hurt anything. 

I have looked through the posts from the students who have completed Phase II so far, and I love the pictures that they are posting.  There are pictures of places that I would love to see one day, a few with attached descriptions to their pictures.  There are a few questions listed for everyone to answer, but not many people seem to be doing so.  I wonder if I did.  I cannot remember off the top of my head, so I will need to go back and check.  So far everyone seems to be posting pictures that have to do with either nature or history.  We may be able to pull a theme from that for our travel brochure, but I am going to wait to see and not jump the gun. 

I may have figured out what program I want to use for our travel brochure.  I came across this website www.empressr.com .  This is presentation software that is very similar to Powerpoint.  The main differences are that it is online and some of the transitions are different.    I am going to keep looking for another possible technology to use, but if I cannot find anything, I will use this one.

Tables and Profiles

My professor emailed everyone today to inform us that we are going to start using a table on our Group’s main page to help monitor the completion of each assignment.  Thank goodness I started keeping one a few days ago!  We are also required to find everyone in the groups’ profile page and link it to the table.  This way we can get to know each other.   I think this is a WONDERFUL idea.  We will be able to get more of an idea of who we are working with and possibly build a sense of community.  I am hoping that a sense of community will get more students to begin posting their Phase I and IIs.   I just have to figure out how to find everyone's profiles.  I can access the ones for the students who have participated, but not the others.

I have not seen anything posted by my groups’ Leader, the student from ECI 524, yet other than his own postings to Phases I and II.  I am curious what they have been told in their class, and if they understand what their role it supposed to be. 

I have been looking over possible sites to use for creating a presentation.  Prezi and Glogster are the first ones that come to mind and the most popular ones when I search.  However I honestly feel that neither will accomplish what I want it to.  Prezi is a nice program, but it can be a little jumpy when going from one section to another.  Glogster on the other hand is more of a poster creation, and I do not think it will accurately fulfill the assignments requirements.  I could use Powerpoint, but it is something that I have used quite a lot in the past, so I want to try something new.  I will need to keep looking.

Student left Group

I am beginning to wonder how often the group members check the GLIP group main page, or if they check the forums at the bottom.  There has been some progress on individual’s websites, but nothing so far on the forum.  We now have responses from 6 students on Phase I and 4 on Phase II.  After thinking about it, I decided to create a table on the group’s main page to keep track of who has completed the assignments and who has not so far.  I hope this will encourage more participation from the other group members.  It is difficult to begin working on the travel brochure with less than half of the group members participating so far. 

We did receive a post onto the “Questions” forum from one of the cooperating teachers.  He wanted to inform us that one of the students in our groups has switched classes.  He has encouraged the student to continue to participate.  Unfortunately I doubt if he will do so.  It is disappointing, especially since this was a student that was active within our group.

Taking More of a Lead Role

A few days ago I went onto the GLIP website and was hoping to see some activity throughout the site.  Unfortunately I was a little disappointed.  Nothing has really been added to our main page addressing the group as a whole or enticing participation, and many of the students have not posted their responses to Phase I, which was due on 02/19.  So I emailed my professor who is connected to GLIP to ask about these things as well as a few other questions.  She responded to me rather quickly giving me permission to kind of take more of a lead role if I felt it necessary.

So I went to the site today and posted a greeting on the top of the group’s main page in the hopes of creating more of a welcoming site that the students will want to visit more.  I also created a few threads in the forum at the bottom of the main page to try and encourage more students to participate.  For Phase I, I went through each person’s page and read through their responses.  At this point only 5 people (myself included) have completed the assignment.  My professor assured me that some schools are having technical difficulties with getting onto the GLIP Wiki to be able to add to it.  I hope that once everything gets worked out, we’ll have more participation.

I like to use positive feedback with everyone.  I believe that people (students and peers alike) are more responsive to compliments and constructive criticisms that negative critiques.  Because of this, I went through my group mates responses and tried to pull things from them to post in a forum.   This was intended to brag on those people, their responses, and the commonalities that were found.  With students in a classroom this technique can quickly entice participation since students want to be included in the list.  I hope this has the same effect online.

The second forum I created while I was in the “creating” mode is for Phase II.  This assignment requires the members of the group to find pictures that show where they are from and tell a little bit about them.  Then collectively the group is to create a travel brochure that showcases each of the countries.  As the technology facilitator, I need to figure out a technological way to create the travel brochure.   It will require me to do some research online and see what options are out there.

GLIP

This is the first of many posts which will reflect and document my participation within a Global Literacies Initiative Project (GLIP).  Its goal is to join together students of a variety of grade levels in a variety of countries together with a common assignment.  The assignment has been divided into 3 phases, each of which has specific directions, some of which encourage and require the students to work together.  I am in a group with 16 other students from 9 different schools in 4 different countries.  The schools range from elementary school through college.


I have been assigned the role of Technology Facilitator for this project, and I am VERY nervous about this fact.  I keep wondering about what types of technology issues I may encounter while trying to work with a group this diverse.  At the same time, I am very excited.  One of the other students within my group is a fellow NCSU student who is in another class.  His role is to be the Group Facilitator and lead everything.  I think this will make things go very smoothly

I am very excited about GLIP, there seems to be a lot of opportunities in how this can go.  The whole project is being completed on a Wikispace website, which will enable everyone to edit it and add their own twist and opinions to everything.  I look forward to see how different people and different cultures approach a similar topic.
The first phase of the assignment just requires for everyone to respond to a few questions about what makes them the person that they are.  I have a poem that I wrote about the different things that make me “me”.  I believe that I am going to try to and incorporate it somewhere in my answer.  I like the flow of it, and I think it helps answer what Phase I is looking for.


Sooo… here goes!