Final Self Reflection

At the end of our group project, I feel that it went quite well and that we accomplished what we set out to do. We had a rocky start the first week, because we didn't quite know what we were doing and everyone had different ideas about what should be done. I think in the future we would do much better if we set up group roles and responsibilities from the beginning. If everyone knew what their role was, it would be much easier to divvy up the work fairly and without too much discussion. We did end up with different roles within the group, but it took some time to actually get that figured out and that felt like a lot of wasted time.

What I did really like about our group is that we were very efficient when we finally settled into our group roles. We did our work quickly, then came back together to go over it. We are all secondary teachers and so we didn't worry too much about how the site looked at first, we were mostly looking at making it simple and realistic for high school teachers. As we moved through the project we also made the site interactive for students. I would definitely focus on making the site user friendly for students from the get-go next time, since that makes good sense for high school.

I also learned a lot of new things about Blogger by working through this program and it makes me excited to have my students do projects on their blogs because they are so good at figuring out technology as they go. I think they will really excel at helping each other learn the technology and that will be a positive experience for them.

Reflection on Group Work

Designing a project with a group can be a very daunting task. There is not only the project to design, but you also have to take group dynamics into consideration. I think our group ended up working quite well together even though we had a rough start. Our group had a lot of strong, opinionated individuals who have strong ideas about how things should be done. Since we didn't have a cohesive idea of what we were doing, we ended up with 3 different ideas about what we were doing. I don't think this is actually a bad thing. It just makes you find ways to work within your strengths. We found that dividing up the work and working separately, then coming back together for evaluation and feedback was the most efficient way for our group to get work done. It turns out that our ideas merged pretty well in the end and we were all able to work together.

I do think that this can be a problem with groups of students as well. Anytime people care about something there are usually strong opinions associated with it. If students are working on something they love, they are much more likely to be motivated and engaged, but it may also cause more conflict if they have disagreements. This is a good real-world skill to learn as we always have to work within our schools, communities, and families.