Post Final-Project Course Reflection

Many experiences I had while working on my final course project with Jono serve as great examples of the value this course has had.

First while planning this project, Jono and I realized that a jigsaw project involving student photo movies needed a platform for the students to put all their pieces together. Last semester, I would have asked students to put their pieces into a common folder on our school server and then assembled them myself or perhaps asked one or two students to be the final assemblers. A few days ago, Jono and I hunted for and discovered an online video editor where students could upload video clips and combine them into a final movie. This is essentially like a wiki for movies. Now the students can be part of their collaboration until the completion of the final product.

Next, in the short time between when Jono and I published our project sketches on our blogs, we received feedback from a Technology-Based Project expert from the US. Obviously, such feedback was only accessible to us once we made our sketches publicly available. Last semester, we would have had to rely on each other for ideas and a first experience to see what improvements we could make.

Finally, while simplifying the text that we were asking the students to work with, we both began working on the same computer. One of us read the original text, we discussed modifications, and the other typed. We thought we could save time by each modifying half of the text and then putting our two halves together. We set to work on our individual computers. But the breakthrough for us came when we realized we could share a text document through Google Docs and work simultaneously on the document. Now we didn't need to look over each other's shoulder if we had a question; we could both see it on the screen. We jointly finished simplifying the text and can now both access it for final edits. No multiple versions. No emailing files. All convenient and efficient.

In short, today's experience captures some of my learnings from this course. Collaboration is getting easier and easier for students and teachers alike given the developments in technology. Technology also gives us access to remote feedback from others who we don't even have to know.

During this course, I had a few experiences where I realized that some of the collaborative applications could save real time and paper. For example, using a spreadsheet in Google Docs for students to share data made it easy for them to see each other's work and draw conclusions from a larger set of data than just their own.

To me, this course has been as much about exploiting technology for my own professional practice as for collaboration for the students. Hopefully, I can continue these new practices now that the course is finished.