Embedded Files
My role in the project
My role in the project
I was mainly responsible for creating the nonlinear storytelling application in the 2nd session of our educational package. This included several subtasks, such as:
Researching technology tools
Implementing the story
Integrating interactive elements into the story using programming
Formatting the story's appearance using programming
Making our project into a web application by hosting it on a web server
Besides that, I was also responsible for other subtasks, such as:
Designing and creating the detective game in the first session
Designing and creating the students' activities in the third session
Creating the assessment rubrics in the third session
Writing the technology justification report
Collaboration Progress
Collaboration Progress
Our collaboration process was very structured, methodical and consistent. We worked on this project for two months, scheduling meetings, doing individual work. I would say that we did a very good job in documenting the process, keeping a shared folder from the start, where all the documents were visible to everyone. Creating the sessions into subfolders was also very useful in our progressing with the learning materials.
I found that the good organization that we had from the start helped us progress very smoothly in practical matters. It was clear to everyone what they needed to do after every meeting, the TODO list was always visible, we split the tasks easily and everyone contributed actively by doing their parts.
Personally, what also really helped me was that the other two team members had more teaching experience than I did, which brought valuable insight on the collaboration around building lesson plans, organizing the materials, keeping a common theme and appearance through our materials and paying attention to detail.
Besides the university's sharepoints where all important files were kept,we also had a Whatsapp group for more direct communication and planning of our meetings. The way we went about our meetings was that we booked study rooms in the library. At the end of each meeting, we decided on the next available time that was common to the three of us, and scheduled it on the spot.
This strategy personally helped to keep me engaged with the project and keep in mind the deliverables until the next session.
Lastly, a strategy that we used to split the task and make the subtasks clear for each group member, was to use a color for each person and highlight the tasks that they had to do until the next session.
An example of this is shown on the right.
Personal Reflections
Personal Reflections
Some very important reflections and lessons learned from this collaborative final project are:
Sometimes being able to deliver a complete body of work is more important than having extraordinary ideas. Feasibility might sometimes clash with creativity but it is highly significant to be realistic. Personally I often get carried away by my ideas, which in the past has led to many unfinished projects due to lack of time or overwhelm and cognitive load that comes in the process of actually implementing those ideas. Keeping my feet on the ground is a reminder that I usually get from other people, which also happened in this project by my group's members and course's supervisor notes, and I can now evaluate that it's a very useful reminder that leads to better and more well-rounded results.
When talking about K-12 education, it is very important to take distance from your own point of view when designing a learning experience. This might seem like an obvious observation but during the process of this project I found myself thinking "this is too simplistic", or "this is too basic". I found myself wanting to complicate things so that it would be more 'intriguing' for the students. However, thinking about this retrospectively, the truth is that I was seeing things from my own point of view and with the knowledge that I have, not through the lenses of a 10th grade student. Simple doesn't necessarily mean boring, it can be equally meaningful to a complex concept.
It's near impossible for people in a collaborative situation to share the same individual and team goals. This is something that we're being taught in theory, but when experiencing it it becomes a lot more intense on the emotional scale. Having this in mind as factual information that doesn't change, is very helpful in my opinion, because it saves a lot of unnecessary efforts perhaps to try to convince someone to share the same goals with you. In this context however, it's also a very important balance to keep between stepping down and compromising when needed but also stepping up and supporting your ideas when you feel that they matter.
Self-motivation should be the power source to everything that you do. Often in collaborative settings the dynamic of the team can impact one's motivation positively and encourage them to get involved or it might have the opposite effect. In my experience with this project the latter happened in the first 1-2 meetings. Internally I felt discouraged because I found things to be too operational and structured for my working style, I felt that we had concluded on a topic too soon and that I hadn't had enough time to digest all the topics and think it through, but also felt that if we brainstormed more we might have reached to deeper concepts or involve more thematic areas from this course's contents. Brainstorming personally is a very significant activating process for my motivation so when I feel that I can't let myself free and have to think in boxes it somehow impacts me negatively. This discouragement was temporary, I had to work with myself to not let my negativity at that time affect the group (surely this wasn't 100% controllable and some things showed anyway). Either way I figured that it was best to not communicate all those thoughts at the moments that we were making the decisions because I really hadn't worked them through in my mind! Initial reactions are often impulsive and don't contain one's whole truth or perspectives about a situation. When I worked those thoughts in my mind, it made a lot more sense to trust my group-mates, to see the potential of our idea,to focus on how I could bridge my thoughts to this idea instead of trying to contradict it because it just wasn't productive neither for me or the team. After this process, I found myself being actually very keen to the topic we had selected and starting to have ideas on how we could progress with it!
It's important, within the goals of the collaboration, to create your own personal space, a sphere in which you have the creative freedom to experiment with things that you like. This comes by being internally motivated to pursue your own interests, always making sure that the balances and well-being of the team are kept and that you are contributing in a meaningful way. For me in this project, this personal space was my involvement in building the non-linear storytelling web application. I tried to work towards our common goal but including my personality, background knowledge and skills in the process. Even though there were simpler solutions to doing the same thing and achieving similar results, I wanted to learn something new, sharpen my coding skills and practice with tools that I hadn't had before. I think that I achieved that and I'm very content about that. I feel that I gained a lot which of course affected very positively my overall feeling about our project. It was significant for me to be "selfish" in that sense and progress through individual decision-making within the group.
Overall, my umbrella-takeaway is:
Overall, my umbrella-takeaway is:
Regulation of emotions is KEY to healthy collaborations.
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