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!