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.