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.